"L  I  E)  R.ARY 

OF  THE 
U  N  I  VLR5  ITY 
or  ILLINOIS 

6 


CHARLES  DICKENS 
From  a  Photograph  taken  in  1868  by  Mason  8c  Company 


DICKENS 

BY 


ADOLPHUS  WILLIAM  WARD 

ALSO 

SPENSER 

By  R.  W.  CHURCH 

SCOTT 

By  RICHARD  H.  HUTTON 


NEW  YORK 

ARKELL  WEEKLY  COMPANY 
1895 


PREFACE. 


At  the  close  of  a  letter  addressed  by  Dickens  to  his  friend  John 
Forster,  but  not  to  be  found  in  the  EngHsh  editions  of  the  Lt/e, 
the  writer  adds  to  his  praises  of  the  biography  of  Goldsmith  these 
memorable  words :  I  desire  no  better  for  my  fame,  when  my  per- 
sonal dustiness  shall  be  past  the  control  of  my  love  of  order,  than 
such  a  biographer  and  such  a  critic."  Dickens  was  a  man  of  few 
close  friendships,  —  his  breast,"  he  said,  would  not  hold  many 
people,"  —  but,  of  these  friendships,  that  with  Forster  was  one  of 
the  earliest,  as  it  was  one  of  the  most  enduring.  To  Dickens,  at 
least,  his  future  biographer  must  have  been  the  embodiment  of  two 
qualities  rarely  combined  in  equal  measure  —  discretion  and  can- 
dour. In  literary  matters  his  advice  was  taken  almost  as  often  as 
it  was  given,  and  nearly  every  proof-sheet  of  nearly  every  work  of 
Dickens  passed  through  his  faithful  helpmate's  hands.  Nor  were 
there  many  important  decisions  formed  by  Dickens  concerning 
himself  in  the  course  of  his  manhood  to  which  Forster  was  a 
stranger,  though,  unhappily,  he  more  than  once  counselled  in  vain. 

On  Mr.  Forster's  Life  of  Charles  Dickens,  together  with  the 
three  volumes  of  Letters  collected  by  Dickens's  eldest  daughter 
and  his  sister-in-law,  —  his  **  dearest  and  best  friend,"  —  it  is  super- 
fluous to  state  that  the  biographical  portion  of  the  following  essay 
is  mainly  based.  It  may  be  superfluous,  but  it  cannot  be  con- 
sidered impertinent,  if  I  add  that  the  shortcomings  of  the  Life 
have,  in  my  opinion,  been  more  frequently  proclaimed  than  de- 
fined ;  and  that  its  merits  are  those  of  its  author  as  well  as  of  its 
subject. 

My  sincere  thanks  are  due  for  various  favours  shown  to  me  in 
connexion  with  the  production  of  this  little  volume  by  Miss 
Hogarth,  Mr.  Charles  Dickens,  Professor  Henry  Morley,  Mr. 
Alexander  Ireland,  Mr.   John  Evans,  Mr.  Robinson,  and  Mr. 

3 


4 


PREFACE, 


Britton.  Mr.  Evans  has  kindly  enabled  me  to  correct  some  in- 
accuracies in  Mr.  Forster's  account  of  Dickens's  early  Chatham 
days  on  unimpeachable  first-hand  evidence.  I  also  beg  Captain 
and  Mrs.  Budden  to  accept  my  thanks  for  allowing  me  to  see  Gad's 
Hill  Place. 

I  am  under  special  obligations  to  Mr.  R.  F.  Sketchley,  Librarian 
of  the  Dyce  and  Forster  Libraries  in  South  Kensington,  for  his 
courtesy  in  affording  me  much  useful  aid  and  information.  With 
the  kind  permission  of  Mrs.  Forster,  Mr.  Sketchley  enabled  me  to 
supplem-ent  the  records  of  Dickens's  life,  in  the  period  1838-41, 
from  a  hitherto  unpublished  source  —  a  series  of  brief  entries  by 
him  in  four  volumes  of  The  Law  ajid  Commercial  Daily  Re7nem- 
brancer  for  those  years.  These  volumes  form  no  part  of  the  Forster 
bequest,  but  were  added  to  it,  under  certain  conditions,  by  Mrs. 
Forster.  The  entries  are  mostly  very  brief ;  and  sometimes  there 
are  months  without  an  entry.  Many  days  succeed  one  another 
with  no  other  note  than  *'  Work." 

Mr.  R.  H.  Shepherd's  Bibliog7'aphy  of  Dickens  has  been  of  con- 
siderable service  to  me.  May  I  take  this  opportunity  of  commend- 
ing to  my  readers,  as  a  charming  reminiscence  of  the  connexion 
between  Charles  Dickens  and  Rochester^  Mr.  Robert  Langton's 
sketches  illustrating  a  paper  recently  printed  under  that  title  ? 

Last,  not  least,  as  the  Germans  say,  I  wish  to  thank  my  friend 
Professor  T.  N.  Toller  for  the  friendly  counsel  which  has  not  been 
wanting  to  me  on  this,  any  more  than  on  former  occasions. 


A.  V/.  W. 


CONTENTS. 


PAGE 

Preface    3 

CHAPTER  1. 

Before  "  Pickwick    7 

CHAPTER  n. 

From  Success  to  Success  18 

CHAPTER  HI. 

Strange  Lands  35 

CHAPTER  IV. 

**  David  Copperfield  "  56 

CHAPTER  V. 

Changes  69 

CHAPTER  VI. 

Last  Years  91 

CHAPTER  VII. 

The  Future  of  Dickens's  Fame  118 


DICKENS. 


CHAPTER  I. 

BEFORE  PICKWICK.'^ 
[1812-1835.] 

Charles  Dickens,  the  eldest  son,  and  the  second  of  the  eight 
children,  of  John  and  Elizabeth  Dickens,  was  born  at  Landport,  a 
suburb  of  Portsea,  on  Friday,  February  7,  1812.  His  baptismal 
names  were  Charles  John  HufFham.  His  father,  at  that  time  a 
clerk  in  the  Navy  Pay  Office,  and  employed  in  the  Portsmouth 
Dock-yard,  was  recalled  to  London  when  his  eldest  son  was  only 
two  years  of  age ;  and  two  years  afterwards  was  transferred  to 
Chatham,  where  he  resided  with  his  family  from  18 16  to  1821. 
Thus  Chatham,  and  the  more  venerable  city  of  Rochester  adjoining, 
with  their  neighbourhood  of  chalk  hills  and  deep  green  lanes  and 
woodland  and  marshes,  became,  in  the  words  of  Dicken's  biogra- 
pher, the  birthplace  of  his  fancy.  He  looked  upon  himself  as,  to 
all  intents  and  purposes,  a  Kentish  man  born  and  bred,  and  his 
heart  was  always  in  this  particular  corner  of  the  incomparable 
county.  Again  and  again,  after  Mr.  Alfred  Jinglels  spasmodic  elo- 
quence had,  in  the  very  first  number  of  Fick<wick,  epitomised  the 
antiquities  and  comforts  of  Rochester,  already  the  scene  of  one  of 
the  Sketches^  Dickens  returned  to  the  local  associations  of  his  early 
childhood.  It  was  at  Chatham  that  poor  little  David  Copperfield, 
on  his  solitary  tramp  to  Dover,  slept  his  Sunday  night's  sleep  "  near 
a  cannon,  happy  in  the  society  of  the  sentry's  footsteps  ; and  in 
many  a  Christmas  narrative  or  uncommercial  etching  the  familiar 
features  of  town  and  country,  of  road  and  river,  wxre  reproduced ; 
before  in  Great  Expectations  they  suggested  some  of  the  most  pic- 
turesque effects  of  his  later  art,  and  before  in  his  last  unfinished 
romance  his  faithful  fancy  once  more  haunted  the  well-known  pre- 
cincts. During  the  last  thirteen  years  of  his  life  he  was  again  an 
inhabitant  of  the  loved  neighbourhood  where,  with  the  companions 
of  his  mirthful  idleness,  he  had  so  often  made  holiday;  where, 
when  hope  was  young,  he  had  spent  his  honey-moon ;  and  whither, 

7 


8 


DICKENS, 


after  his  last  restless  wanderings,  he  was  to  return,  to  seek  such 
repose  as  he  would  allow  himself,  and  to  die.  But,  of  course,  the 
daily  life  of  the  very  queer  small  boy"  of  that  early  time  is  only 
quite  incidentally  to  be  associated  with  the  grand  gentleman's 
house  on  Gad's  Hill,  where  his  father,  little  thinking  that  his  son 
was  to  act  over  again  the  story  of  Warren  Hastings  and  Daylesford, 
had  told  him  he  might  some  day  come  to  live,  if  he  were  to  be  very 
persevering,  and  to  work  hard.  The  family  abode  was  in  Ordnance 
(not  St.  Mary's)  Place,  at  Chatham,  amidst  surroundings  classified 
in  Mr.  Pickwick's  notes  as  appearing  to  be  soldiers,  sailors,  Jews, 
chalk,  shrimps,  offices,  and  dock-yard  men."  But  though  the  half- 
mean,  half-picturesque  aspect  of  the  Chatham  streets  may  already 
at  an  early  age  have  had  its  fascination  for  Dickens,  yet  his  childish 
fancy  v/as  fed  as  fully  as  were  his  powers  of  observation.  Having 
learned  reading  from  his  mother,  he  was  sent  with  his  elder  sister, 
Fanny,  to  a  day-school  kept  in  Gibraltar  Place,  New  Road,  by  Mr. 
William  Giles,  the  eldest  son  and  namesake  of  a  worthy  Baptist 
minister,  whose  family  had  formed  an  intimate  acquaintance  with 
their  neighbours  in  Ordnance  Row.  The  younger  Giles  children 
were  pupils  at  the  school  of  their  elder  brother  with  Charles  and 
Fanny  Dickens,  and  thus  naturally  their  constant  playmates.  In 
later  life  Dickens  preserved  a  grateful  remembrance,  at  times  re- 
freshed by  pleasant  communications  betv/een  the  families,  of  the 
training  he  had  received  from  Mr.  William  Giles,  an  intelligent  as 
well  as  generous  man,  who,  recognising  his  pupil's  abilities,  seems 
to  have  resolved  that  they  should  not  lie  fallow  for  want  of  early 
cultivation.  Nor  does  there  appear  to  be  the  slightest  reason  for 
supposing  that  this  period  of  his  life  was  anything  but  happy.  For 
his  sister  Fanny  he  always  preserved  a  tender  regard ;  and  a  touch- 
ing little  paper,  written  by  him  after  her  death  in  womanhood,  re- 
lates how  the  two  children  used  to  watch  the  stars  together,  and 
make  friends  with  one  in  particular,  as  belonging  to  themselves. 
*But  obviously  he  did  not  lack  playmates  of  his  own  sex;  and  it 
was  no  doubt  chiefly  because  his  tastes  made  him  disinclined  to 
take  much  part  in  the  rougher  sports  of  his  school-fellows,  that  he 
found  plenty  of  time  for  amusing  himself  in  his  own  way.  And 
thus  it  came  to  pass  that  already  as  a  child  he  followed  his  own 
likings  in  the  tw^o  directions  from  which  they  were  never  very 
materially  to  swerve.  He  once  said  of  himself  that  he  had  been 
**  a  writer  when  a  mere  baby,  an  actor  always." 

Of  these  two  passions  he  could  always,  as  a  child  and  as  a  man, 
be  *' happy  with  either,"  and  occasionally  with  both  at  the  same 
time.  In  his  tender  years  he  was  taken  by  a  kinsman,  a  Sandhurst 
cadet,  to  the  theatre,  to  see  the  legitimate  drama  acted,  and  was 
disillusioned  by  visits  behind  the  scenes  at  private  theatricals ; 
while  his  own  juvenile  powers  as  a  teller  of  stories  and  singer  of 
con'iic  songs  (he  was  possessed,  says  one  who  remembers  him,  of  a 
sweet  treble  voice)  were  displayed  on  domestic  chairs  and  tables,  and 
then  in  amateur  plays  with  his  school-fellows.  He  also  wrote  a  — 
not  strictly  original  —  tragedy,  which  is  missing  among  his  Re^ 


DICKENS. 


9 


printed  Pieces.  There  is  nothing  unique  in  these  childish  doini^s, 
nor  in  the  circumstance  that  he  was  an  eager  reader  of  works  of  fic- 
tion ;  but  it  is  noteworthy  that  chief  among  the  books  to  which  he 
appUed  himself,  in  a  small  neglected  bookroom  in  his  father's  house, 
were  those  to  which  his  allegiance  remained  true  through  much  of 
his  career  as  an  author.  Besides  books  of  travel,  which  he  says  had 
a  fascination  for  his  mind  from  his  earliest  childhood,  besides  the 
**  Arabian  Nights"  and  kindred  tales,  and  the  English  Essayists, 
he  read  Fielding  and  Smollett,  and  Cervantes  and  Le  Sage,  in  all 
innocence  of  heart,  as  well  as  Mrs.  Inchbald's  collection  of  farces, 
in  all  contentment  of  spirit.  Inasmuch  as  he  was  no  great  reader  in 
the  days  of  his  authorship,  and  had  to  go  through  hard  times  of  his 
own  before,  it  was  well  that  the  literature  of  his  childhood  was  good 
of  its  kind,  and  that  where  it  was  not  good  it  was  at  least  gay. 
Dickens  afterwards  made  it  an  article  of  his  social  creed  that  the 
imagination  of  the  young  needs  nourishment  as  much  as  their  bodies 
require  food  and  clothing ;  and  he  had  reason  for  gratefully  remem- 
bering that  at  all  events  the  imaginative  part  of  his  education  had 
escaped  neglect. 

But  these  pleasant  early  days  came  to  a  sudden  end.  In  the  year 
1 82 1  his  family  returned  to  London,  and  soon  his  experiences  of 
trouble  began.  Misfortune  pursued  the  elder  Dickens  to  town,  his 
salary  having  been  decreased  already  at  Chatham  in  consequence  of 
one  of  the  early  efforts  at  economical  reform.  He  found  a  shabby 
home  for  his  family  in  Bayham  Street,  Camden  Town ;  and  here, 
what  with  the  pecuniary  embarrassments  in  which  he  was  peren- 
nially involved,  and  what  with  the  easy  disposition  with  which  he 
was  blessed  by  way  of  compensation,  he  allowed  his  son's  education 
to  take  care  of  itself.  John  Dickens  appears  to  have  been  an  hon- 
ourable as  well  as  a  kindly  man.  His  son  always  entertained  an 
affectionate  regard  for  him,  and  carefully  arranged  for  the  comfort 
of  his  latter  years ;  nor  would  it  be  fair,  because  of  a  similarity  in 
their  experiences,  and  in  the  grandeur  of  their  habitual  phraseology, 
to  identify  him  absolutely  with  the  immortal  Mr.  Micawber.  Still 
less,  except  in  certain  details  of  manner  and  incident,  can  the  char- 
acter of  the  elder  Dickens  be  thought  to  have  suggested  that  of  the 
pitiful  ''Father  of  the  Marshalsea,"  to  v/hich  prison,  almost  as  fa- 
mous in  English  fiction  as  it  is  in  English  history,  the  unlucky  navy- 
clerk  was  consigned  a  year  after  his  return  to  London. 

Every  effort  had  been  made  to  stave  off  the  evil  day ;  and  little 
Charles,  whose  eyes  were  always  wide  open,  and  who  had  begun  to 
write  descriptive  sketches  of  odd  personages  among  his  acquaint- 
ance, had  become  familiar  with  the  inside  of  a  pawnbrokers  shop, 
and  had  sold  the  paternal  ^'library''  piecemeal  to  the  original  of 
the  drunken  second-hand  bookseller,  with  whom  David  Copperfield 
dealt  as  Mr.  Micawber's  representative.  But  neither  these  sacri- 
fices nor  Mrs.  Dickens's  abortive  efforts  at  setting  up  an  educa- 
tional establishment  had  been  of  avail.  Her  husband's  creditors 
would  not  give  him  time ;  and  a  dark  period  began  for  the  family, 
and  more  especially  for  the  little  eldest  son,  now  ten  years  old,  in 


lO 


DICKENS. 


which,  as  he  afterwards  wrote,  in  bitter  anguish  of  remembrance, 
**but  for  the  mercy  of  God,  he  might  easily  have  become,  for  any 
care  that  was  taken  of  him,  a  little  robber  or  a  little  vagabond." 

Forster  has  printed  the  pathetic  fragment  of  autobiography,  com- 
municated to  him  by  Dickens  five-and-twenty  years  after  the  period 
to  which  it  refers,  and  subsequently  incorporated  with  but  few 
changes  in  the  Perso7ial  History  of  David  Copperfield,  Who  can 
forget  the  thrill  with  which  he  first  learned  the  well-kept  secret  that 
the  story  of  the  solitary  child,  left  a  prey  to  the  cruel  chances  of 
the  London  streets,  was  an  episode  in  the  life  of  Charles  Dickens 
himself  ?  Between  fact  and  fiction  there  was  but  a  difference  of 
names.  Murdstone  &  Grinby's  wine  warehouse  down  in  Black- 
friars  was  Jonathan  Warren's  blacking  warehouse  at  Hungerford 
Stairs,  in  which  a  place  had  been  found  for  the  boy  by  a  relative,  a 
partner  in  the  concern ;  and  the  bottles  he  had  to  paste  over  with 
labels  v/ere  in  truth  blacking-pots.  But  the  menial  work  and  the 
miserable  pay,  the  uncongenial  companionship  during  worktime, 
and  the  speculative  devices  of  the  dinner-hour  were  the  same  in 
each  case.  At  this  time,  after  his  family  had  settled  itself  in  the 
Marshalsea,  the  haven  open  to  the  little  waif  at  night  was  a  lodging 
in  Little  College  Street,  Camden  Town,  presenting  even  fewer  attrac- 
tions than  Mr.  Micawber's  residence  in  Windsor  Terrace,  and  kept 
by  a  lady  afterwards  famous  under  the  name  of  Mrs.  Pipchin.  His 
Sundays  were  spent  at  home  in  the  prison.  On  his  urgent  remon- 
strance—  the  first  I  had  ever  made  about  my  lot"  —  concerning 
the  distance  from  his  family  at  which  he  was  left  through  the  week, 
a  back  attic  was  found  for  him  in  Lant  Street,  in  the  Borough, 
*'  where  Bob  Sawyer  lodged  many  years  afterwards ;"  and  he  now 
breakfasted  and  supped  with  his  parents  in  their  apartment.  Here 
they  lived  in  fair  comfort,  waited  upon  by  a  faithful  **  orfling,"  who 
had  accompanied  the  family  and  its  fortunes  from  Chatham,  and 
who  is  said  by  Forster  to  have  her  part  in  the  character  of  the 
Marchioness.  Finally,  after  the  prisoner  had  obtained  his  dis- 
charge, and  had  removed  with  his  family  to  the  Lant  Street  lodg- 
ings, a  quarrel  occurred  between  the  elder  Dickens  and  his  cousin, 
and  the  boy  was  inconsequence  taken  away  from  the  business. 

He  had  not  been  ill-treated  there ;  nor  indeed  is  it  ill-treatment 
which  leads  to  David  Copperfield^s  running  away  in  the  story. 
Nevertheless,  it  is  not  strange  that  Dickens  should  have  looked 
back  with  a  bitterness  very  unusual  in  him  upon  the  bad  old  days 
of  his  childish  solitude  and  degradation.  He  never  **  forgot"  his 
mother's  having  wished  him  to  remain  in  the  warehouse ;  the  sub- 
ject of  his  employment  there  was  never  afterwards  mentioned  in 
the  family ;  he  could  not  bring  himself  to  go  near  old  Hungerford 
Market  so  long  as  it  remained  standing ;  and  to  no  human  being, 
not  even  to  his  wife,  did  he  speak  of  this  passage  in  his  life  until  he 
narrated  it  in  the  fragment  of  autobiography  which  he  confided  to 
his  trusty  friend.  Such  a  sensitiveness  is  not  hard  to  explain ;  for 
no  man  is  expected  to  dilate  upon  the  days  **  when  he  lived  among 
the  beggars  in  St.  Mary  Axe,"  and  it  is  only  the  Bounderbies  of 


DICKENS. 


II 


society  who  exult,  truly  or  falsely,  in  the  sordid  memories  of  the 
time  before  they  became  rich  or  powerful.  And  if  the  sharp  expe- 
riences of  his  childhood  might  have  ceased  to  be  resented  by  one 
whom  the  world  on  the  whole  treated  so  kindly,  at  least  they  left 
his  heart  unhardened,  and  helped  to  make  him  ever  tender  to  the 
poor  and  weak,  because  he  too  had  after  a  fashion  **  eaten  his  bread 
with  tears  "  when  a  puny  child. 

A  happy  accident  having  released  the  David  Copperfield  of  actual 
life  from  his  unworthy  bondage,  he  was  put  in  the  way  of  an  educa- 
tion such  as  at  that  time  was  the  lot  of  most  boys  of  the  class  to 
which  he  belonged.  **The  world  has  done  much  better  since  in 
that  way,  and  will  do  far  better  yet,"  he  writes  at  the  close  of  his 
description  of  Our  School^  the  Wellington  House  Academy,  situate 
near  that  point  in  the  Hampstead  Road  where  modest  gentility  and 
commercial  enterprise  touch  hands.  Other  testimony  confirms  his 
sketch  of  the  ignorant  and  brutal  head-master;  and  doubtless  this 
worthy  and  his  usher,  "considered  to  know  everything  as  opposed 
to  the  chief  who  was  considered  to  know  nothing,"  furnished  some 
of  the  features  in  the  portraits  of  Mr.  Creakle  and  Mr.  Mell.  But 
it  has  been  very  justly  doubted  by  an  old  school-fellow  whether  the 
statement  We  were  First  Boy  "  is  to  be  regarded  as  strictly  his- 
torical. If  Charles  Dickens,  when  he  entered  the  school,  was  "  put 
into  Virgil,"  he  was  not  put  there  to  much  purpose.  On  the  otlier 
hand,  with  the  return  of  happier  days  had  come  the  resumption  of 
the  old  amusements  which  were  to  grow  into  the  occupations  of  his 
life.  A  club  was  founded  among  the  boys  at  Wellington  House  for 
the  express  purpose  of  circulating  short  tales  written  by  him,  and  he 
was  the  manager  of  the  private  theatricals  which  they  contrived  to 
set  on  foot. 

After  two  or  three  years  of  such  work  and  play  it  became  neces- 
sary for  Charles  Dickens  once  more  to  think  about  earning  his  bread. 
His  father,  who  had  probably  lost  his  official  post  at  the  time  when, 
in  Mr.  Micawber's  phrase,  **hope  sunk  beneath  the  horizon,"  was 
now  seeking  employment  as  a  parliamentary  reporter,  and  must  have 
rejoiced  when  a  Gray's  Inn  solicitor  of  his  acquaintance,  attracted  by 
the  bright,  clever  looks  of  his  son,  took  the  lad  into  his  office  as 
a  clerk  at  a  modest  weekly  salary.  His  office  associates  here  were 
perhaps  a  grade  or  two  above  those  of  the  blacking  warehouse  ;  but 
his  danger  now  lay  rather  in  the  direction  of  the  vulgarity  which  he 
afterwards  depicted  in  such  samples  of  the  profession  as  Mr.  Guppy 
and  Mr.  Jobling.  He  is  said  to  have  frequented,  in  company  with 
a  fellow-clerk,  one  of  the  minor  theatres,  and  even  occasionally  to 
have  acted  there ;  and  assuredly  it  must  have  been  personal  knowl- 
edge which  suggested  the  curiously  savage  description  of  Private 
Theatres  in  the  Sketches  by  B02,  the  all  but  solitary  unki7idly  refer- 
ence to  theatrical  amusements  in  his  works.  But  whatever  his  expe- 
riences of  this  kind  may  have  been,  he  passed  unscathed  through 
them ;  and  during  the  year  and  a  half  of  his  clerkship  picked  up 
sufficient  knowledge  of  the  technicalities  of  the  law  to  be  able  to 
assail  its  enormities  without  falUng  into  rudimentary  errors  about  it, 


12 


DICKENS. 


and  sufficient  knowledge  of  lawyers  and  lawyers^  men  to  fill  a  whole 
chamber  in  his  gallery  of  characters. 

Oddly  enough,  it  was,  after  all,  the  example  of  the  father  that  led 
the  son  into  the  line  of  life  from  which  he  was  easily  to  pass  into 
the  career  where  success  and  fame  awaited  him.  The  elder  Dick- 
ens having  obtained  employment  as  a  parliamentary  reporter  for 
the  MoniiJig  Herald^  his  son,  who  was  living  with  him  in  Bentinck 
Street,  Manchester  Square,  resolved  to  essay  the  same  laborious 
craft.  He  was  by  this  time  nearly  seventeen  years  of  age,  and 
already  we  notice  in  him  what  were  to  remain,  through  life,  two  of 
his  most  marked  characteristics  —  strength  of  will,  and  a  determi- 
nation, if  he  did  a  thing  at  all,  to  do  it  thoroughly.  The  art  of 
short-hand,  which  he  now  resolutely  set  himself  to  master,  was  in 
those  days  no  easy  study,  though,  possibly,  in  looking  back  upon 
his  first  efforts,  David  Copperfield  overestimated  the  difficulties 
which  he  had  conquered  with  the  help  of  love  and  Traddles.  But 
Dickens,  whose  education  no  Dr.  Strong  had  completed,  perceived 
that  in  order  to  succeed  as  a  reporter  of  the  highest  class  he  needed 
something  besides  the  knowledge  of  short-hand.  In  a  word,  he 
lacked  reading ;  and  this  deficiency  he  set  himself  to  supply  as 
best  he  could  by  a  constant  attendance  at  the  British  Museum. 
Those  critics  who  have  dwelt  on  the  fact  that  the  reading  of  Dick- 
ens was  neither  very  great  nor  very  extensive,  have  insisted  on 
what  is  not  less  true  than  obvious ;  but  he  had  this  one  quality  of 
the  true  lover  of  reading,  that  he  never  professed  a  famiharity  with 
that  of  which  he  knew  little  or  nothing.  He  continued  his  visits  to 
the  Museum,  even  when  in  1828  he  had  become  a  reporter  in  Doc- 
tors' Commons.  With  this  occupation  he  had  to  remain  as  content 
as  he  could  for  nearly  two  years.  Once  more  David  Copperfield, 
the  double  of  Charles  Dickens  in  his  youth,  will  rise  to  the  memory 
of  every  one  of  his  readers.  For  not  only  was  his  soul  seized  with 
a  weariness  of  Consistory,  Arches,  Delegates,  and  the  rest  of  it,  to 
which  he  afterwards  gave  elaborate  expression  in  his  story,  but  his 
heart  was  full  of  its  first  love.  In  later  days  he  was  not  of  opinion 
that  he  had  loved  particularly  wisely ;  but  how  well  he  had  loved  is 
known  to  every  one  who  after  him  has  lost  his  heart  to  Dora. 
Nothing  came  of  the  fancy,  and  in  course  of  time  he  had  compo- 
sure enough  to  visit  the  lady  v/ho  had  been  its  object  in  the  com- 
pany of  his  wife.  He  found  that  Jip  was  stuffed  as  well  as  dead, 
and  that  Dora  had  faded  into  Flora ;  for  it  was  as  such  that,  not 
very  chivalrously,  he  could  bring  himself  to  describe  her,  for  the 
second  time,  in  Little  Dorrit, 

Before  at  last  he  was  engaged  as  a  reporter  on  a  newspaper,  he 
had,  and  not  for  a  moment  only,  thought  of  turning  aside  to 
another  profession.  It  was  the  profession  to  which  —  uncommer- 
cially  —  he  was  attached  during  so  great  a  part  of  his  life,  that  when 
he  afterwards  created  for  himself  a  stage  of  his  own,  he  seemed  to 
be  but  following  an  irresistible  fascination.  His  best  friend  de- 
scribed him  to  me  as  **a  born  actor;"  and  who  needs  to  be  told 
that  the  world  falls  into  two  divisions  only  —  those  whose  place  is 


DICKENS. 


13 


before  the  foot-lights,  and  those  whose  place  is  behind  them  ?  His 
love  of  acting  was  stronger  than  himself;  and  I  doubt  v/hether  he 
ever  saw  a  play  successfully  performed  without  longing  to  be  in 
and  of  it.  "  Assumption,"  he  wrote  in  after  days  to  Lord  Lytton,* 
has  charms  for  me  —  I  hardly  know  for  how  many  wild  reasons  — 
so  delightful  that  I  feel  a  loss  of,  oh !  I  can't  say  what  exquisite 
foolery,  when  I  lose  a  chance  of  being  some  one  in  voice,  etc.,  not 
at  all  like  myself."  He  loved  the  theatre  and  everything  which 
savoured  of  histrionics  with  an  intensity  not  even  to  be  imagined 
by  those  who  have  never  felt  a  touch  of  the  same  passion.  He  had 
that  belief  in  a  play  "  which  he  so  pleasantly  described  as  one  of 
the  characteristics  of  his  life-long  friend,  the  great  painter,  Clark- 
son  Stanfield.  And  he  had  that  unextinguishable  interest  in  both 
actors  and  acting  which  makes  a  little  separate  world  of  the  "  qual- 
ity." One  of  the  staunchest  friendships  of  his  life  was  that  with 
the  foremost  English  tragedian  of  his  age,  Macready ;  one  of  the 
delights  of  his  last  years  was  his  intimacy  with  another  well-known 
actor,  the  late  Mr.  Fechter.  No  performer,  however,  was  so  ob- 
scure or  so  feeble  as  to  be  outside  the  pale  of  his  sympathy.  His 
books  teem  with  kindly  likenesses  of  all  manner  of  entertainers  and 
entertainments  —  from  Mr.  Vincent  Crummies  and  the  more  or  less 
legitimate  drama,  down  to  Mr.  Sleary\s  horse-riding  and  Mrs.  Jar- 
ley's  wax-work.  He  has  a  friendly  feeling  for  Chops  the  dwarf, 
and  for  Pickleson  the  giant ;  and  in  his  own  quiet  Broadstairs  he 
cannot  help  tumultuously  applauding  a  young  lady  "  v/ho  goes  into 
the  den  of  ferocious  lions,  tigers,  leopards,  etc.,  and  pretends  to  go 
to  sleep  upon  the  principal  lion,  upon  which  a  rustic  keeper,  who 
speaks  through  his  nose,  exclaims,  *  Behold  the  abazid  power  of 
woobad  ! ' "  He  was  unable  to  sit  through  a  forlorn  performance  at 
a  v/retched  country  theatre  without  longing  to  add  a  sovereign  to 
the  four-and-ninepence  which  he  had  made  out  in  the  house  when 
he  entered,  and  which  *'  had  warmed  up  in  the  course  of  the  even- 
ing to  twelve  shillings ; "  and  in  Bow  Street,  near  his  office,  he  was 
beset  by  appeals  such  as  that  of  an  aged  and  greasy  suitor  for  an 
engagement  as  Pantaloon:  Mr.  Dickens,  you  know  our  profes- 
sion, sir — no  one  knows  it  better,  sir  —  there  is  no  right  feeling  in 
it.  I  was  Harlequin  on  your  own  circuit,  sir,  for  five-and-thirty 
years,  and  was  displaced  by  a  boy,  sir !  —  a  boy  !  "  Nor  did  his  dis- 
position change  when  he  crossed  the  seas ;  the  streets  he  first  sees 
in  the  United  States  remind  him  irresistibly  of  the  set-scene  in  a 
London  pantomime  ;  and  at  Verona  his  interest  is  divided  between 
Romeo  and  Juliet  and  the  vestiges  of  an  equestrian  troupe  in  the 
amphitheatre. 

What  success  Dickens  might  have  achieved  as  an  actor  it  is 
hardly  to  the  present  purpose  to  inquire.  A  word  will  be  said  be- 
low of  the  success  he  achieved  as  an  amateur  actor  and  manager, 
and  in  his  more  than  half-dramatic  readings.  But,  the  influence  of 
early  associations  and  personal  feelings  apart,  it  would  seem  that 
the  artists  of  the  stage  w'hom  he  most  admired  were  not  those  of 
the  highest  type.    He  was  subdued  by  the  genius  of  Frederic 


14 


DICKENS. 


Lemaitre,  but  blind  and  deaf  to  that  of  Ristori.  "  Sound  melo- 
drama and  farce''  were  the  dramatic  species  which  he  aftected,  and 
in  which  as  a  professional  actor  he  might  have  excelled.  His  inten- 
sity might  have  gone  for  much  in  the  one,  and  his  versatility  and 
volubility  for  more  in  the  other ;  and  in  both,  as  indeed  in  any  kind 
of  play  or  part,  his  thoroughness,  which  extended  itself  to  every 
detail  of  performance  or  make-up,  must  have  stood  him  in  excellent 
stead.  As  it  was,  he  was  preserved  for  literature.  But  he  had 
carefully  prepared  himself  for  his  intended  venture,  and  when  he 
sought  aa  engagement  at  Covent  Garden,  a  preliminary  interview 
with  the  manager  was  postponed  only  on  account  of  the  illness  of 
the  applicant. 

Before  the  next  theatrical  season  opened  he  had  at  last  —  in  the 
year  1831  — obtained  employment  as  a  parliamentary  reporter,  and 
after  some  earlier  engagements  he  became,  in  1834,  one  of  the 
reporting  staff  of  the  famous  Whig  Moj'ning  Chroincle^  then  in  its 
best  days  under  the  editorship  of  Mr.  John  Black.  Now,  for  the 
first  time  in  his  life,  he  had  an  opportunity  of  putting  forth  the  en- 
ergy that  was  in  him.  He  shrunk  from  none  of  the  difficulties 
which  in  those  days  attended  the  exercise  of  his  craft.  They  were 
thus  depicted  by  himself,  when  a  few  years  before  his  death  he 
"  held  a  brief  for  his  brothers "  at  the  dinner  of  the  Newspaper 
Press  Fund:  "I  have  often  transcribed  for  the  printer  from  my 
short-hand  notes  important  public  speeches  in  which  the  strictest 
accuracy  was  required,  and  a  mistake  in  which  would  have  been  to 
a  young  man  severely  compromising;  writing  on  the  palm  of  my 
hand,  by  the  light  of  a  dark  lantern,  in  a  post-chaise  and  four,  gal- 
loping through  a  wild  country,  and  through  the  dead  of  the  night, 
at  the  then  surprising  rate  of  fifteen  miles  an  hour.  ...  I  have 
worn  my  knees  by  writing  on  them  on  the  old  back  row  of  the  old 
gallery  of  the  old  House  of  Commons  ;  and  I  have  worn  my  feet  by 
standing  to  write  in  a  preposterous  pen  in  the  old  House  of  Lords, 
where  we  used  to  be  huddled  together  like  so  many  sheep  kept  in 
waiting,  say,  until  the  woolsack  might  want  restuffing.  Returning 
home  from  excited  political  meetings  in  the  country  to  the  waiting 
press  in  London,  I  do  verily  believe  I  have  been  upset  in  almost 
every  description  of  vehicle  known  in  this  country.  I  have  been  in 
my  time  belated  on  miry  by-roads,  towards  the  small  hours,  forty 
or  fifty  miles  from  London,  in  a  wheelless  carriage,  with  exhausted 
horses  and  drunken  post-boys,  and  have  got  back  in  time  for  publi- 
cation, to  be  received  with  never-forgotten  compliments  by  the  late 
Mr.  Black,  coming  in  the  broadest  of  Scotch  from  the  broadest  of 
hearts  I  ever  knew."  Thus  early  had  Dickens  learnt  the  secret  of 
throwing  himself  into  any  pursuit  once  taken  up  by  him,  and  of  half 
achieving  his  task  by  the  very  heartiness  with  which  he  set  about 
it.  When  at  the  close  of  the  parliamentary  session  of  the  year  1836 
his  labours  as  a  reporter  came  to  an  end,  he  was  held  to  have  no 
equal  in  the  gallery.  During  tliis  period  his  naturally  keen  powers 
of  observation  must  have  been  sharpened  and  strengthened,  and 
that  quickness  of  decision  acquired  which  constitutes,  perhaps,  the 


DICKENS. 


most  valuable  lesson  that  journali:stic  practice  of  any  kind  can  teach 
to  a  young  man  of  letters.  '\  o  Dickens's  experience  as  a  reporter 
may  likewise  be  traced  no  small  part  of  his  political  creed,  in  which 
there  was  a  good  deal  of  infidelity  ;  or,  at  all  events,  his  determined 
contempt  for  the  parliamentary  style  proper,  whether  in  the  mouth 
of  *'Thisman"  or  of  "  Thatman,''  and  his  rooted  dislike  of  the 
**  cheap-jacks "  and  "national  dustmen "  whom  he  discerned  among 
our  orators  and  legislators.  There  is  probably  no  very  great  num- 
ber of  Members  of  Parliament  who  are  heroes  to  those  who  wait 
attendance  on  their  words.  Moreover,  the  period  of  Dickens's 
most  active  labours  as  a  reporter  was  one  that  succeeded  a  time  of 
great  political  excitement ;  and  when  men  wish  thankfully  to  rest 
after  deeds,  w^ords  are  in  season. 

Meanwhile,  very  tentatively,  and  with  a  very  imperfect  conscious- 
ness of  the  signiticance  for  himself  of  his  first  steps  on  a  slippery 
path,  Dickens  had  begun  the  real  career  of  his  life.  It  has  been 
seen  how  he  had  been  a  writer  as  a  baby,"  as  a  school-boy,  and 
as  a  lawyer's  clerk,  and  the  time  had  come  when,  like  all  writers,  he 
wished  to  see  himself  in  print.  In  December,  1833,  the  Monthly 
Magaziiie  published  a  paper  which  he  had  dropped  into  its  letter- 
box, and  with  eyes  dimmed  with  joy  and  pride  "  the  young  author 
beheld  his  first-born  in  print.  The  paper,  called  A  Dinner  at  Pop- 
lar Walk,  was  afterwards  reprinted  in  the  Sketches  by  Boz  under 
the  title  of  Mr,  Minns  and  his  Cousin,  and  is  laughable  enough. 
His  success  emboldened  him  to  send  fiirther  papers  of  a  similar 
character  to  the  same  magazine,  which  published  ten  contributions 
of  his  by  February,  1835.  That  which  appeared  in  August,  1834, 
was  the  first  signed  Boz,"  a  nickname  given  by  him  in  his  boy- 
hood to  a  favourite  brother.  Since  Dickens  used  this  signature 
not  only  as  the  author  of  the  Sketches  and  a  few  other  minor  pro- 
ductions, but  also  as  ''editor"  of  the  Pickwick  Papers,  it  is  not 
surprising  that,  especially  among  his  admirers  on  the  Continent 
and  in  America,  the  name  should  have  clung  to  him  so  tenaciously. 
It  was  on  a  steamboat  near  Niagara  that  he  heard  from  his  state- 
room a  gentleman  complaining  to  his  wife:  Boz  keeps  himself 
very  close." 

But  the  Monthly  Magazine,  though  warmly  welcoming  its  young 
contributor's  lively  sketches,  could  not  afford  to  pay  for  them.  He 
was  therefore  glad  to  conclude  an  arrangement  with  Mr.  George 
Hogarth,  the  conductor  of  the  Evening  Chronicle,  a  paper  in  con- 
nexion with  the  great  morning  journal  on  the  reporting  staff  of 
which  he  was  engaged.  He  had  gratuitously  contributed  a  sketch 
to  the  evening  paper  as  a  personal  favour  to  Mr.  Hogarth,  and  the 
latter  readily  proposed  to  the  proprietors  of  the  Morniftg  Chronicle 
that  Dickens  should  be  duly  remunerated  for  this  addition  to  his 
regular  labours.  With  a  salary  of  seven  instead  of,  as  heretofore, 
five  guineas  a  week,  and  settled  in  chambers  in  Furnival's  Inn  — 
one  of  those  old  legal  inns  which  he  loved  so  well  —  he  might 
already  in  this  year,  1835,  consider  himself  on  the  highroad  to 
prosperity.    By  the  beginning  of  1836,  the  Sketches  by  Bo^,  printed 


i6 


DICKENS, 


in  the  Evening  Chro7ticIe,  were  already  numerous  enough,  and  their 
success  was  sufficiently  established  to  allow  of  his  arranging  for 
their  republication.  They  appeared  in  two  volumes,  with  etchings 
by  Cruikshank,  and  the  sum  of  a  hundred  and  fifty  pounds  was  paid 
to  him  for  the  copyright.  The  stepping-stones  had  been  found  and 
passed,  and  on  the  last  day  of  March,  which  saw  the  publication  of 
the  first  number  of  the  Pickwick  Pa-pers,  he  stood  in  the  field  of 
fame  and  fortune.  Three  days  afterwards  Dickens  married  Catherine 
Hogarth,  the  eldest  daughter  of  the  friend  who  had  so  efficiently 
aided  him  in  his  early  literary  ventures.  Mr.  George  Hogarth^s 
name  thus  links  together  the  names  of  two  masters  of  English  fiction  ; 
for  Lockhart  speaks  of  him  when  a  writer  to  the  signet  in  Edinburgh 
as  one  of  the  intimate  friends  of  Scott.  Dickens's  apprenticeship 
as  an  author  was  over  almost  as  soon  as  it  was  begun ;  and  he  had 
found  the  way  short  from  obscurity  to  the  dazzling  light  of  popular- 
ity. As  for  the  Sketches  by  Bos,  their  author  soon  repurchased  the 
copyright  for  more  than  thirteen  times  the  sum  v/hich  had  been 
paid  to  him  for  it. 

In  their  collected  form  these  Sketches  modestly  described  them- 
selves as  'illustrative  of  every-day  life  and  every-day  people." 
Herein  they  only  prefigured  the  more  famous  creations  of  their 
writer,  whose  genius  was  never  so  happy  as  when  lighting  up,  now 
the  humorous,  now  what  he  chose  to  term  the  romantic,  side  of 
familiar  things.  The  curious  will  find  little  difficulty  in  tracing  in 
these  outlines,  often  rough  and  at  times  coarse,  the  groundwork  of 
more  than  one  finished  picture  of  later  date.  Not  a  few  of  the 
most  peculiar  features  of  Dickens's  humour  are  already  here,  together 
with  not  a  little  of  his  most  characteristic  pathos.  It  is  true  that  in 
these  early  Sketches  the  latter  is  at  times  strained,  but  its  power  is 
occasionally  beyond  denial,  as,  for  instance,  in  the  brief  narrative 
of  the  death  of  the  hospital  patient.  On  the  other  hand,  the 
humour  —  more  especially  that  of  the  Tales  —  is  not  of  the  most 
refined  sort,  and  often  degenerates  in  the  direction  of  boisterous 
farce.  The  style,  too,  though  in  general  devoid  of  the  pretentious- 
ness which  is  the  bane  of  *'  light*'  journalistic  writing,  has  a  taint 
of  vulgarity  about  it,  very  pardonable  under  the  circumstances,  but 
generally  absent  from  Dickens's  later  works.  Weak  puns  are  not 
unfrequent ;  and  the  diction  but  rarely  reaches  that  exquisite  felicity 
of  comic  phrase  in  which  Pickwick  and  its  successors  excel.  P^or 
the  rest,  Dickens's  favourite  passions  and  favourite  aversions  alike 
reflect  themselves  here  in  small.  In  the  description  of  the  election 
for  beadle  he  ridicules  the  tricks  and  the  manners  of  political  part}^- 
life,  and  his  love  of  things  theatrical  has  its  full  freshness  upon  it 
—  however  he  may  pretend  at  Astley\s  that  his  histrionic  taste  is 
gone,''  and  that  it  is  the  audience  which  chiefly  delights  him.  But 
of  course  the  gift  which  these  Sketches  pre-eminently  revealed  in 
their  author  was  a  descriptive  power  that  seemed  to  lose  sight  of 
nothing  cliaracteristic  in  the  object  described,  and  of  nothing 
humorous  in  an  association  suggested  by  it.  Whether  his  theme 
was  street  or  river,  a  Christmas  dinner  or  the  extensive  groves  of 


DICKENS. 


17 


the  illustrious  dead  (the  old  clothes  shops  in  Monmouth  Street),  he 
reproduced  it  in  all  its  shades  and  colours,  and  under  a  hundred 
aspects,  fanciful  as  well  as  real.  How  inimitable,  for  instance,  is 
the  sketch  of  the  last  cab-driver,  and  the  first  omnibus  cad," 
whose  earlier  vehicle,  the  omnipresent  red  cab,"  was  not  a 
gondola,  but  the  very  fire-ship  of  the  London  streets. 

Dickens  himself  entertained  no  high  opinion  of  these  youthful 
efforts ;  and  in  this  he  showed  the  consciousness  of  the  true  artist, 
that  masterpieces  are  rarely  thrown  off  at  hazard.  But  though 
much  of  the  popularity  of  the  Sketches  may  be  accounted  for  by 
the  fact  that  commonplace  people  love  to  read  about  common- 
place people  and  things,  the  greater  part  of  it  is  due  to  genuine 
literary  merit.  The  days  of  half-price  in  theatres  have  followed  the 
days  of  coaching;  '*  Honest  Tom"  no  more  paces  the  lobby  in  a 
black  coat  with  velvet  facings  and  cuffs,  and  a  D'Orsay  hat ;  the 
Hickses  of  the  present  time  no  longer  quote  "Don  Juan"  over 
boarding-house  dinner-tables ;  and  the  young  ladies  in  Camberweil 
no  longer  compare  young  men  in  attitudes  to  Lord  Byron,  or  to 
**  Satan"  Montgomery.  But  the  Sketches  by  B02  have  survived 
their  birth-time  ;  and  they  deserve  to  be  remembered  among  the 
rare  instances  in  which  a  young  author  has  no  sooner  begun  to 
v/rite  than  he  has  shown  a  knowledge  of  his  real  strength.  As  yet, 
however,  this  sudden  favourite  of  the  public  was  unaware  of  the 
range  to  which  is  powers  were  to  extend,  and  of  the  height  to 
vvdiich  they  were  to  mount. 


1 8  DICKENS, 


CHAPTER  II. 

FROM  SUCCESS  TO  SUCCESS. 
[1836-1841.J 

Even  in  those  years  of  which  the  record  is  brightest  in  the  story 
of  his  life,  Charles  Dickens,  like  the  rest  of  the  world,  had  his  share 
of  troubles  —  troubles  great  and  small,  losses  which  went  home  to 
his  heart,  and  vexations  manifold  in  the  way  of  business.  But  in 
the  history  of  his  early  career  as  an  author  the  word  failure  has 
no  place. 

Not  that  the  Posthumous  Papers  of  the  Pickwick  Club^  published 
as  they  were  in  monthly  numbers,  at  once  took  the  town  by  storm  ; 
for  the  public  needed  two  or  three  months  to  make  up  its  mind  that 
'*Boz"  was  equal  to  an  effort  considerably  in  advance  of  his 
Sketches.  But  when  the  popularity  of  the  serial  was  once  estab- 
lished, it  grew  with  extraordinary  rapidity  until  it  reached  an  alto- 
gether unprecedented  height.  He  would  be  a  bold  man  who 
should  declare  that  its  popularity  has  very  materially  diminished 
at  the  present  day.  Against  the  productions  of  Pickwick^  and  of 
other  works  of  amusement  of  which  it  was  the  prototype.  Dr. 
Arnold  thought  himself  bound  seriously  to  contend  among  the 
boys  of  Rugby  ;  and  twenty  years  later  young  men  at  the  university 
talked  nothing  but  Pickwick^  and  quoted  nothing  but  Pickwick^ 
and  the  wittiest  of  undergraduates  set  the  world  at  large  an  exami- 
nation paper  in  Pickwick,  over  which  pretentious  half-knowledge 
may  puzzle,  unable  accurately  to  describe  the  common  Pro  feel- 
machine,^'  or  to  furnish  a  satisfactory  definition  of  a  red-faced 
Nixon."  No  changes  in  manners  and  customs  have  interfered 
with  the  hold  of  the  work  upon  nearly  all  classes  of  readers  at 
home ;  and  no  translation  has  been  dull  enough  to  prevent  its 
being  relished  even  in  countries  where  all  English  manners  and 
customs  must  seem  equally  uninteresting  or  equally  absurd. 

So  extraordinary  has  been  the  popularity  of  this  more  than  thrice 
fortunate  book,  that  the  wildest  legends  have  grown  up  as  to  the 
history  of  its  origin.  The  facts,  however,  as  stated  by  Dickens 
himself,  are  few  and  plain.  Attracted  by  the  success  of  the  Sketches, 
Messrs.  Chapman  &  Hall  proposed  to  him  that  he  should  write 
'*  something''  in  monthly  numbers  to  serve  as  a  vehicle  for  certain 
plates  to  be  executed  by  the  comic  draughtsman,  Mr.  R.  Seymour; 
and  either  the  publishers  or  the  artist  suggested,  as  a  kind  of  lead- 


DICKENS, 


19 


ing  notion,  the  idea  of  a  Nimrod  Club"  of  unlucky  sportsmen. 
The  proposition  was  at  Dickens's  suggestion  so  modified  that  the 
plates  were  to  arise  naturally  out  of  the  text/'  the  range  of  the 
latter  being  left  open  to  him.  This  explains  why  the  rather  artifi- 
cial machinery  of  a  club  was  maintained,  and  why  Mr.  Winkle's 
misfortunes  by  flood  and  field  hold  their  place  by  the  side  of  the 
philanthropical  meanderings  of  Mr.  Pickwick  and  the  amorous 
experiences  of  Mr.  Tupman.  An  original  was  speedily  found  for 
the  pictorial  presentment  of  the  hero  of  the  book,  and  a  felicitous 
name  for  him  soon  suggested  itself.  Only  a  single  number  of  the 
serial  had  appeared  when  Mr.  Seymour's  own  hand  put  an  end  to 
his  life.  It  is  well  known  that  among  the  applicants  for  the  vacant 
office  of  illustrator  of  the  Pickivick  Papers  was  Thackeray,  —  the 
senior  of  Dickens  by  a  few  months,  —  whose  style  as  a  draughts- 
man would  have  been  singularly  unsuited  to  the  adventures  and  the 
gaiters  of  Mr.  Pickwick.  Finally,  in  no  altogether  propitious  hour 
for  some  of  Dickens's  books,  Mr.  Hablot  Browne  (*'Phiz'')  was 
chosen  as  illustrator.  Some  happy  hits  —  such  as  the  figure  of  Mr. 
Micawber  —  apart,  the  illustrations  of  Dickens  by  this  artist,  though 
often  both  imaginative  and  effective,  are  apt,  on  the  one  hand,  to 
obscure  the  author's  fidelity  to  nature,  and  on  the  other,  to  inten- 
sify his  unreality.  Oliver  Twist,  like  the  Sketches,  was  illustrated 
by  George  Cruikshank,  a  pencil  humourist  of  no  common  calibre, 
but  as  a  rule  ugly  with  the  whole  virtuous  intention  of  his  heart. 
Dickens  himself  was  never  so  well  satisfied  with  any  illustrator  as 
with  George  Cattermole  {alias  "  Kittenmoles "),  a  connexion  of 
his  by  marriage,  w^ho  co-operated  with  Hablot  Browne  in  Master 
Htunphrey'^s  Clock ;  in  his  latest  works  he  resorted  to  the  aid  of 
younger  artists,  whose  reputation  has  since  justified  his  confidence. 
The  most  congenial  of  the  pictorial  interpreters  of  Dickens,  in  his 
brightest  and  freshest  humour,  was  his  valued  friend  John  Leech, 
whose  services,  together  occasionally  with  those  of  Doyle,  Frank 
Stone,  and  Tenniel,  as  well  as  of  his  faithful  Stanfield  and  Maclise, 
he  secured  for  his  Christmas  books. 

The  Pickwick  Papers,  of  which  the  issue  was  completed  by  the 
end  of  1837,  brought  in  to  Dickens  a  large  sum  of  money,  and 
after  a  time  a  handsome  annual  income.  On  the  whole,  this  has 
remained  the  most  general  favourite  of  all  his  books.  Yet  it  is  not 
for  this  reason  only  that  Pickwick  defies  criticism,  but  also  because 
the  circumstances  under  which  the  book  was  begun  and  carried  on 
make  it  preposterous  to  judge  it  by  canons  applicable  to  its  author's 
subsequent  fictions.  As  the  serial  proceeded,  the  interest,  which 
was  to  be  divided  between  the  inserted  tales,  some  of  which  have 
real  merit,  and  the  framework,  was  absorbed  by  the  latter.  The 
rise  in  the  style  of  the  book  can  almost  be  measured  by  the  change 
in  the  treatment  of  its  chief  character,  Mr.  Pickwick  himself.  In 
a  later  preface,  Dickens  endeavoured  to  illustrate  this  change  by 
the  analogy  of  real  life.  The  truth,  of  course,  is  that  it  v/as  only 
as  the  author  proceeded  that  he  recognised  the  capabilities  of  the 
character,  and  his  own  power  of  making  it,  and  his  book  with  it, 


20 


DICKENS. 


truly  lovable  as  well  as  laughable.  Thus,  on  the  very  same  page 
in  which  Mr.  Pickwick  proves  himself  a  true  gentleman  in  his  leave- 
taking  from  Mr.  Nupkins,  there  follows  a  little  bit  of  the  idyl  be- 
tween Sam  and  the  pretty  housemaid,  WTitten  with  a  delicacy  that 
could  hardly  have  been  suspected  in  the  chronicler  of  the  experi- 
ences of  Miss  Jemima  Evans  or  of  Mr.  Augustus  Cooper.  In  the 
subsequent  part  of  the  main  narrative  will  be  found  exemplified 
nearly  all  the  varieties  of  pathos  of  which  Dickens  was  afterwards 
so  repeatedly  to  prove  himself  master,  more  especially,  of  course, 
in  those  prison  scenes  for  which  some  of  our  older  novelists  may 
have  furnished  him  with  hints.  Even  that  subtle  species  of  humour 
is  not  wanting  which  is  content  to  miss  its  effect  with  the  less  atten- 
tive reader;  as  in  this  passage  concerning  the  ruined  cobbler's 
confidences  to  Sam  in  the  Fleet :  — 

"  The  cobbler  paused  to  ascertain  what  effect  his  story  had  produced  on  Sam ; 
but  finding  that  he  had  dropped  asleep,  knocked  the  ashes  out  of  his  pipe,  sighed^ 
put  it  down,  drew  the  bedclothes  over  his  head,  and  went  to  sleep  too." 

Goldsmith  himself  could  not  have  put  more  of  pathos  and  more  of 
irony  into  a  single  word. 

But  it  may  seem  out  of  place  to  dwell  upon  details  such  as  this 
in  view  of  the  broad  and  universally  acknowledged  comic  effects  of 
this  masterpiece  of  English  humour.  Its  many  genuinely  comic 
characters  are  as  broadly  marked  as  the  heroes  of  the  least  refined 
of  sporting  novels,  and  as  true  to  nature  as  the  most  elaborate  pro- 
ducts of  Addison's  art.  The  authors  humour  is  certainly  not  one 
which  eschews  simple  in  favour  of  subtle  means,  or  which  is  averse 
from  occasional  desipience  in  the  form  of  the  wildest  farce.  Mrs. 
Leo  Hunter's  garden-party  —  or  rather  public  breakfast"  —  at 
The  Den,  Eatanswill ;  Mr.  Pickwick's  nocturnal  descent,  through 
three  gooseberry-bushes  and  a  rose-tree,  upon  the  virgin  soil  of 
Miss  Tomkins's  establishment  for  young  ladies  ;  the  supplice  (Tiin 
homme  of  Mr.  Pott ;  Mr.  Weller  junior's  love-letter,  with  notes  and 
comments  by  Mr.  Weller  senior,  and  Mr.  Weller  senior's  own  letter 
of  affliction  written  by  somebody  else;  the  footmen's  **swarry"  at 
Bath,  and  Mr.  Bob  Sawyer's  bachelors'  party  in  the  iBorough  —  all 
these  and  many  other  scenes  and  passages  have  in  them  that  jovial 
element  of  exaggeration  which  nobody  mistakes  and  nobody  resents. 
Whose  duty  is  it  to  check  the  volubility  of  Mr.  Alfred  Jingle,  or  to 
weigh  the  heaviness,  quot  libras,  of  the  Fat  Boy?  Every  one  is 
conscious  of  the  fact  that  in  the  contagious  high  spirits  of  the 
author  lies  one  of  the  chief  charms  of  the  book.  Not,  however, 
that  the  effect  produced  is  obtained  without  the  assistance  of  a  very 
vigilant  art.  Nowhere  is  this  more  apparent  than  in  the  character 
which  is,  upon  the  whole,  the  most  brilliant  of  the  many  brilliant 
additions  which  the  author  made  to  his  original  group  of  personages. 
If  there  is  nothing  so  humorous  in  the  book  as  Sam  Weller,  neither 
is  there  in  it  anything  more  pathetic  than  the  relation  between  him 
and  his  master.    As  ifor  Sam  Weller's  style  of  speech,  scant  justice 


DICKENS. 


21 


was  done  to  it  by  Mr.  Pickwick  when  he  observed  to  Job  Trotter, 
*'My  man  is  in  the  right,  although  his  mode  of  expressing  his 
opinion  is  somewhat  homely,  and  occasionally  incomprehensible." 
The  fashion  of  Sam's  gnomic  philosophy  is  at  least  as  old  as  Theoc- 
ritus ;  1  but  the  special  impress  which  he  has  given  to  it  is  his  own, 
rudely  foreshadowed,  perhaps,  in  some  of  the  apophthegms  of  his 
father.  Incidental  Sam  Wellerisms  in  Oliver  Twist  and  Nicholas 
Nickleby  show  how  enduring  a  hold  the  whimsical  fancy  had  taken 
of  its  creator.  For  the  rest,  the  freshness  of  the  book  continues 
the  same  to  the  end  ;  and  farcical  as  are  some  of  the  closing  scenes, 
—  those,  for  instance,  in  which  a  chorus  of  coachmen  attends  the 
movements  of  the  elder  Mr.  Weller,  —  there  is  even  here  no  strain- 
ing after  effect.  An  exception  might  perhaps  be  found  in  the  catas- 
trophe of  the  Shepherd,  which  is  coarsely  contrived  ;  but  the  fun  of 
the  character  is  in  itself  neither  illegitimate  nor  unwholesome.  It 
will  be  observed  below  that  it  is  the  constant  harping  on  the  same 
string,  the  repeated  picturing  of  professional  preachers  of  religion 
as  gross  and  greasy  scoundrels,  which  in  the  end  becomes  offensive 
in  Dickens. 

On  the  whole,  no  hero  has  ever  more  appropriately  bidden  fare- 
well to  his  labours  than  Mr.  Pickwick,  in  the  words  which  he 
uttered  at  the  table  of  the  ever-hospitable  Mr.  Wardle,  at  the 
Adelphi. 

"'I  shall  never  regret,'  said  Mr.  Pickwick,  in  a  low  voice  —  'I  shall  never 
regret  having  devoted  the  greater  part  of  two  years  to  mixing  with  different  vari- 
eties and  shades  of  human  character ;  frivolous  as  my  pursuit  of  novelty  may 
appear  to  many.  Nearly  the  whole  of  my  previous  life  liaving  been  devoted  to 
business  and  the  pursuit  of  wealtli,  num.erous  scenes  of  which  I  had  no  previous 
conception  have  dawned  upon  me  —  I  hope  to  the  enlargement  of  my  mind,  and 
to  the  improvement  of  my  understanding.  If  I  have  done  but  little  good,  I  trust 
I  have  done  less  harm,  and  that  none  of  my  adventures  will  be  other  than  a 
source  of  amusing  and  pleasant  recollection  to  me  in  the  decline  of  life.  God 
bless  you  all.' " 

Of  course  Mr.  Pickwick  filled  and  drained  a  bumper''  to  the 
sentiment.  Indeed,  it  ''snoweth"  in  this  book  *' of  meat  and 
drink."  Wine,  ale,  and  brandy  abound  there,  and  viands  to  which 
ample  justice  is  invariably  done  —  even  under  Mr.  Tupman's  heart- 
rending circumstances  at  the  (nov/,  alas !  degenerate)  Leather 
Bottle.  Something  of  this  is  due  to  the  times  in  which  the  work  was 
composed,  and  to  the  class  of  readers  for  which  we  may  suppose  it 
in  the  first  instance  to  have  been  intended ;  but  Dickens,  though 
a  temperate  man,  loved  the  paraphernalia  of  good  cheer,  besides 
cherishing  the  associations  which  are  inseparable  from  it.  At  the 
same  time,  there  is  a  little  too  much  of  it  in  the  Pickwick  Papers, 
however  well  its  presence  may  consort  with  the  geniality  which 
pervades  them.  It  is  difficult  to  turn  any  page  of  the  book  without 
chancing  on  one  of  those  supremely  felicitous  phrases  in  the  ready 

*  See  Idylly  xv.  77,  This  discovery  is  not  my  own,  but  that  of  the  late  Dr.  Donald- 
son,  who  used  to  transLite  the  passage  accordingly  with  great  gusto. 


22 


DICKENS. 


mintage  of  which  Dickens  at  all  times  excelled.  But  its  chief 
attraction  lies  in  the  spirit  of  the  whole  —  that  spirit  of  true  humour 
which  calls  forth  at  once  merriment,  good-will,  and  charity. 

In  the  year  1836,  which  the  commencement  of  the  Pickwick 
Papers  has  made  memorable  in  the  history  of  English  literature, 
Dickens  was  already  in  the  full  tide  of  authorship.  In  February, 
1837,  the  second  number  of  Be7itley^s  Miscellany,  a  new  monthly 
magazine  which  he  had  undertaken  to  edit,  contained  the  opening 
chapters  of  his  story  of  Oliver  Twist,  Shortly  before  this,  in 
September  and  December,  1836,  he  had  essayed  two  of  the  least 
ambitious  branches  of  dramatic  authorship.  The  acting  of  Harley, 
an  admirable  dry  comedian,  gave  some  vitality  to  The  Strange 
Gentlejnan,  a  comic  burletta,"  or  farce,  in  two  acts,  founded  upon 
the  tale  in  the  Sketches  called  The  Great  Winglebiiry  Duel.  It  ran 
for  seventy  nights  at  Drury  Lane,  and,  in  its  author's  opinion,  was 
the  best  thing  Harley  did."  But  the  adaptation  has  no  special 
feature  distinguishing  it  from  the  original,  unless  it  be  the  effective 
bustle  of  the  opening.  The  Village  Coquettes,  an  operetta  repre- 
sented at  the  St.  James's  Theatre,  with  music  by  Hullah,  was  an 
equally  unpretending  effort.  In  this  piece,  Harley  took  one  part, 
that  of  "a  very  small  farmer  with  a  very  large  circle  of  intimate 
friends,"  and  John  Parry  made  his  debut  on  the  London  stage  in 
another.  To  quote  any  of  the  songs  in  this  operetta  would  be  very 
unfair  to  Dickens.^  He  was  not  at  all  depressed  by  the  unfavourable 
criticisms  which  were  passed  upon  his  libretto,  and  against  which 
he  had  to  set  the  round  declaration  of  Braham,  that  there  had  been 
*'no  such  music  since  the  days  of  Shiel,  and  no  such  piece  since 
The  Due7tnay  As  time  went  on,  however,  he  became  anything 
but  proud  of  his  juvenile  productions  as  a  dramatist,  and  strongly 
objected  to  their  revival.  His  third  and  last  attempt  of  this  kind, 
a  farce  called  The  Lamplighter,  which  he  wrote  for  Covent  Garden 
in  1838,  was  never  acted,  having  been  withdrawn  by  Macready's 
wish  ;  and  in  1841,  Dickens  converted  it  into  a  story  printed  among 
the  Picnic  Papers,  a  collection  generously  edited  by  him  for  the 
benefit  of  the  widow  and  children  of  a  publisher  towards  whom  he 
had  little  cause  for  personal  gratitude.  His  friendship  for  Mac- 
ready  kept  alive  in  him  for  some  time  the  desire  to  write  a  comedy 
worthy  of  so  distinguished  an  actor ;  and,  according  to  his  wont, 
he  had  even  chosen  beforehand  for  the  piece  a  name  which  he  was 
not  to  forget  —  No  Ihoroughfare.  But  the  genius  of  the  age, 
an  influence  which  is  often  stronger  than  personal  wishes  or  in- 
clinations, diverted  him  from  dramatic  composition.  He  would 
have  been  equally  unwilling  to  see  mentioned  among  his  literary 
v/orks  the  Life  of  G^'imaldi,  which  he  merely  edited,  and  which 
must  be  numbered  among  forgotten  memorials  of  forgotten  great- 
ness. 

To  the  earlier  part  of  1838  belong  one  or  two  other  publications, 

1  For  operas,  as  a  form  of  dramatic  entertainment,  Dickens  seems  afterwards  to  have 
entertained  a  strong  contempt,  such  as,  indeed,  it  is  difficult  for  any  man  with  a  sense  of 
humour  wholly  to  avoid. 


DICKENS. 


23 


which  their  author  never  cared  to  reprint.  The  first  of  these,  how- 
ever, a  short  pamphlet  entitled  Simday  under  Three  Heads,  is  not 
without  a  certain  biographical  interest.  This  little  book  was  writ- 
ten with  immediate  reference  to  a  bill  for  the  better  observance  of 
the  Sabbath,"  which  the  House  of  Commons  had  recently  thrown 
out  by  a  small  majority ;  and  its  special  purpose  v/as  the  advocacy 
of  Sunday  excursions,  and  harmless  Sunday  amusements,  in  lieu  of 
the  alternate  gloom  and  drunkenness  distinguishing  what  Dickens 
called  a  London  Sunday  as  it  is.  His  own  love  of  fresh  air  and 
brightness  intensified  his  hatred  of  a  formalism  which  shuts  its  ears 
to  argument.  In  the  powerful  picture  of  a  Sunday  evening  in  Lon- 
don, "gloomy,  close,  and  stale,"  which  he  afterwards  drew  in 
Little  Dorritl  he  almost  seems  to  hold  Sabbatarianism  and  the 
weather  responsible  for  one  another.  When  he  afterv/ards  sav/  a 
Parisian  Sunday,  he  thought  it  '*not  comfortable,''  so  that,  like 
others  who  hate  bigotry,  he  may  perhaps  have  come  to  recognise 
the  difficulty  of  arranging  an  English  Sunday  as  it  inigJit  be  made. 
On  the  other  hand,  he  may  have  remembered  his  youthful  fancy  of 
the  good  clergyman  encouraging  a  game  of  cricket  after  church, 
when  thirty  years  later,  wTiting  from  Edinburgh,  he  playfully  pic- 
tured the  counterpart  of  Su7iday  as  Sabbath  bills  would  have  it; 
decribing  hov/  'Uhe  usual  preparations  are  making  for  the  band 
in  the  open  air  in  the  afternoon,  and  the  usual  pretty  children  (se- 
lected for  that  purpose)  are  at  this  moment  hanging  garlands  round 
the  Scott  monument  preparatory  to  the  innocent  Sunday  dance 
round  that  edifice  with  which  the  diversions  invariably  close." 
The  Sketches  of  You7ig  Gentle7nen^  published  in  the  same  year,  are 
little  if  at  all  in  advance  of  the  earlier  Sketches  by  Boz,  and  were 
evidently  written  to  order.  He  finished  them  in  precisely  a  fort- 
night, and  noted  in  his  diary  that  one  hundred  and  twenty-five 
pounds  for  such  a  book,  without  any  name  to  it,  is  pretty  w^ell." 
The  Sketches  of  Voung  Couples,  which  followed  as  late  as  1840, 
have  the  advantage  of  a  facetious  introduction,  suggested  by  her 
Majesty^s  own  announcement  of  her  approaching  marriage.  But 
the  life  has  long  gone  out  of  these  pleasantries,  as  it  has  from 
others  of  the  same  cast,  in  which  many  a  mirthful  spirit,  forced 
to  coin  its  mirth  into  money,  has  ere  now  spent  itself. 

It  was  the  better  fortune  of  Dickens  to  be  able  almost  from  the 
first  to  keep  nearly  all  his  writings  on  a  level  with  his  powers.  He 
never  made  a  bolder  step  forwards  than  when,  in  the  very  midst  of 
the  production  of  Pickwick,  he  began  his  first  long  continuous 
story,  the  Adventures  of  Oliver  Twist.  Those  who  have  looked 
at  the  MS.  of  this  famous  novel  will  remember  the  vigour  of  the 
handwriting,  and  how  few,  in  comparison  with  his  later  MSS.,  are 
the  additions  and  obliterations  which  it  exhibits.  But  here  and 
there  the  writing  shows  traces  of  excitement ;  for  the  author's 
heart  was  in  his  work,  and  much  of  it,  contrary  to  his  later  habit, 
was  written  at  night.  No  doubt  he  was  upheld  in  the  labour  of 
authorship  by  something  besides  ambition  and  consciousness  of 
strength.    Oliver  Twist  was  certainly  written  with  a  purpose,  and 


24 


DICKENS. 


with  one  that  was  afterwards  avowed.  The  author  intended  to  put 
before  his  readers  —  '*so  long  as  their  speech  did  not  offend  the 
ear"  —  a  picture  of  "  dregs  of  Hfe,"  hitherto,  as  he  beheved,  never 
exhibited  by  any  novehst  in  their  loathsome  reality.  Yet  the  old 
masters  of  fiction,  Fielding  in  particular,  as  well  as  the  old  master 
of  the  brush  whom  Dickens  cites  (Hogarth),  had  not  shrunk  from 
the  path  which  their  disciple  now  essayed.  Dickens,  however, 
was  naturally  thinking  of  his  own  generation,  which  had  already 
relished  Paul  Clifford.,  and  which  was  not  to  be  debarred  from 
exciting  itself  over  Jack  Shepard,  begun  before  Oliver  Twist  had 
been  completed,  and  in  the  self-same  magazine.  Dickens's  pur- 
pose was  an  honest  and  a  praiseworthy  one.  But  the  most  power- 
ful and  at  the  same  time  the  most  lovable  element  in  his  genius 
suggested  the  silver  lining  to  the  cloud.  To  that  unfailing  power 
of  sympathy  which  was  the  mainspring  of  both  his  most  affect- 
ing and  his  most  humorous  touches,  we  owe  the  redeeming  features 
in  his  company  of  criminals ;  not  only  the  devotion  and  the  heroism 
of  Nancy,  but  the  irresistible  vivacity  of  the  Artful  Dodger,  and  the 
good-humour  of  Charley  Bates,  which  moved  Talfourd  to  "  plead 
as  earnestly  in  mitigation  of  judgment  "  against  him  as  ever  he  had 
done  "  at  the  bar  for  any  client  he  most  respected."  Other  parts 
of  the  story  were  less  carefully  tempered.  Mr.  Fang,  the  police- 
magistrate,  appears  to  have  been  a  rather  hasty  portrait  of  a  living 
original ;  and  the  whole  picture  of  Bumble  and  Bumbledom  was 
certainly  a  caricature  of  the  working  of  the  new  Poor-law,  con- 
founding the  question  of  its  merits  and  demerits  with  that  of  its 
occasional  maladministration.  On  the  other  hand,  a  vein  of  truest 
pathos  runs  through  the  whole  of  poor  Nancy's  story,  and  adds  to 
the  effect  of  a  marvellously  powerful  catastrophe.  From  Nancy's 
interview  witli  Rose  at  London  Bridge  to  the  closing  scenes  —  the 
flight  of  Sikes,  his  death  at  Jacob's  Island,  and  the  end  of  the  Jew 
—  the  action  has  an  intensity  rare  in  the  literature  of  the  terrible. 
By  the  side  of  this  genuine  tragic  force,  which  perhaps  it  would 
be  easiest  to  parallel  from  some  of  the  **low"  domestic  tragedy 
of  the  Elizabethans,  the  author's  comic  humour  burst  forth  upon 
the  world  in  a  variety  of  entirely  new  types :  Bumble  and  his  part- 
ner; Noah  Claypole,  complete  in  himself,  but  full  of  promise  for 
Uriah  Heep ;  and  the  Jew,  with  all  the  pupils  and  supporters  of  his 
establishment  of  technical  education.  Undeniably  the  story  of 
Oliver  Twist  also  contains  much  that  is  artificial  and  stilted,  with 
much  that  is  weak  and  (the  author  of  Eiidymion  is  to  be  thanked 
for  the  word)  gushy."  Thus,  all  the  Maylie  scenes,  down  to 
the  last  in  which  Oliver  discreetly  glides"  away  from  the  lovers, 
are  barely  endurable.  But,  whatever  its  shortcomings,  Oliver 
Twist  remains  an  almost  unique  example  of  a  young  author's  bril- 
liant success  in  an  enterprise  of  complete  novelty  and  extreme  diffi- 
culty. Some  of  its  situations  continue  to  exercise  their  power  even 
over  readers  already  familiarly  acquainted  with  them ;  and  some 
of  its  characters  will  live  by  the  side  of  Dickens's  happiest  and 
most  finished  creations.    Even  had  a  sapient  critic  been  right  who 


DICKENS. 


25 


declared,  during  the  progress  of  the  story,  that  Mr.  Dickens  ap- 
peared to  have  worked  out  the  particular  vein  of  humour  which 
had  hitherto  yielded  so  much  attractive  metal,"  it  would  have  been 
worked  out  to  some  purpose.  After  makincj  his  readers  merry  with 
Pickwick.,  he  had  thrilled  them  with  Oliver  Twist ;  and  by  the 
one  book  as  by  the  other  he  had  made  them  think  better  of  man- 
kind. 

But  neither  had  his  vein  been  worked  out,  nor  was  his  hand  con- 
tent with  a  single  task.  In  April,  1838,  several  months  before  the 
completion  of  Oliver  Twist.,  the  first  number  of  Nicholas  Nickleby 
appeared ;  and  while  engaged  upon  the  composition  of  these  books 
he  contributed  to  Bentley^s  Miscellany.,  of  which  he  retained  the 
editorship  till  the  early  part  of  1839,  several  smaller  articles.  Of 
these,  the  Mudfog  Papers  have  been  recently  thought  worth  re- 
printing; but  even  supposing  the  satire  against  the  Association  for 
the  Advancement  of  Everything  to  have  not  yet  altogether  lost  its 
savour,  the  fun  of  the  day  before  yesterday  refuses  to  be  revived. 
Nicholas  Nickleby.,  published  in  twenty  numbers,  was  the  labour  of 
many  months,  but  was  produced  under  so  great  a  press  of  work 
that  during  the  whole  time  of  publication  Dickens  was  never  a 
single  number  in  advance.  Yet,  though  not  one  of  the  most 
perfect  of  his  books,  it  is  indisputably  one  of  the  most  thoroughly 
original,  and  signally  illustrates  the  absurdity  of  recent  attempts  to 
draw  a  distinction  between  the  imaginative  romance  of  the  past  and 
the  realistic  novel  of  the  present.  Dickens  was  never  so  strong  as 
when  he  produced  from  the  real ;  and  in  this  instance  —  starting,  no 
doubt,  with  a  healthy  prejudice  —  so  carefully  had  he  inspected  the 
neighbourhood  of  the  Yorkshire  schools,  of  which  Dotheboys  Hall 
was  to  be  held  up  as  the  infamous  type,  that  there  seems  to  be  no 
difficulty  in  identifying  the  site  of  the  very  school  itself ;  while  the 
Portsmouth  Theatre  is  to  the  full  as  accurate  a  study  as  the  York- 
shire school.  So,  again,  as  every  one  knows,  the  Brothers  Chee- 
ryble  were  real  personages,  well  known  in  Manchester,^  where  even 
the  original  of  Tim  Linkinwater  still  survives  in  local  remembrance. 
On  the  other  hand,  with  how  conscious  a  strength  has  the  author's 
imaginative  powder  used  and  transmuted  his  materials  :  in  the  Squeers 
family  creating  a  group  of  inimitable  grotesqueness  ;  i.n  their  hum- 
blest victim,  Smike,  giving  one  of  his  earliest  pictures  of  those  outcasts 
whom  he  drew  again  and  again  with  such  infinite  tenderness  ;  and 
in  Mr.  Vincent  Crummies  and  his  company,  including  the  Phenome- 
non, establishing  a  jest,  but  a  kindly  one,  for  all  times  !  In  a  third 
series  of  episodes  in  this  book,  it  is  universally  agreed  that  the 
author  has  no  less  conspicuously  failed.  Dickens's  first  attempt  to 
picture  the  manners  and  customs  of  the  aristocracy  certainly  resulted 
in  portraying  some  very  peculiar  people.  Lord  Frederick  Verisopht, 
indeed,  —  who  is  allowed  to  redeem  his  character  in  the  end,  — is 
not  without  touches  resembling  nature. 

^  W.  &  D.  Grant  Brothers  had  their  warehouse  at  the  lower  end  of  Cannon  Street, 
and  their  private  house  in  Mosely  Street. 


26 


DICKENS, 


'  I  take  an  interest,  my  lord/  said  Mrs.  Wititterly,  with  a  faint  smile,  such 
an  interest  in  the  drama.' 

"  Ye-es.    It's  very  interasting,'  replied  Lord  Frederick. 

"  '  I'm  always  ill  after  Shakespeare,'  said  Mrs.  Wititterly.  *  I  scarcely  exist 
the  next  day.  I  find  the  reaction  so  very  great  after  a  tragedy,  my  lord,  and 
Shakespeare  is  such  a  delicious  creature.' 

"  *  Ye-es,'  replied  Lord  Frederick.    *  He  was  a  clayver  man.'  " 

But  Sir  Mulberry  Hawk  is  a  kind  of  scoundrel  not  frequently  met 
with  in  polite  society ;  his  henchmen,  Pluck  and  Pyke,  have  the  air 
of  "  followers  of  Don  John,"  and  the  enjoyments  of  the  trainers 
of  young  noblemen  and  gentlemen  at  Hampton  races,  together 
with  the  riotous  debauch  which  precedes  the  catastrophe,  seems 
taken  direct  from  the  transpontine  stage.  The  fact  is  that  Dickens 
was  here  content  to  draw  his  vile  seducers  and  wicked  orgies  just 
as  commonplace  writers  had  drawn  them  a  thousand  times  before, 
and  will  draw  them  a  thousand  times  again.  Much  of  the  hero's 
talk  is  of  the  same  conventional  kind.  On  the  other  hand,  nothing 
could  be  more  genuine  than  the  flow  of  fun  in  this  book,  which 
finds  its  outlet  in  the  most  unexpected  channels,  but  nowhere  so 
resistlessly  as  in  the  invertebrate  talk  of  Mrs.  Nickleby.  For  her 
Forster  discovered  a  literary  prototype  in  a  character  of  Miss 
Austen's ;  but  even  if  Mrs.  Nickleby  was  founded  on  Miss  Bates, 
in  Em?na,  she  left  her  original  far  behind.  Miss  Bates,  indeed,  is 
verbose,  roundabout,  and  parenthetic ;  but  the  widow  never  devi- 
ates into  coherence. 

Nicholas  Nickleby  shows  the  comic  genius  of  its  author  in  full 
activity,  and  should  be  read  with  something  of  the  buoyancy  of 
spirit  in  which  it  was  written,  and  not  with  a  callousness  capable  of 
seeing  in  so  amusing  a  scamp  as  Mr.  Mantalini  one  of  Dickens's 

monstrous  failures."  At  the  same  time  this  book  displays  the 
desire  of  the  author  to  mould  his  manner  on  the  old  models.  The 
very  title  has  a  savour  of  Smollett  about  it ;  the  style  has  more  than 
one  reminiscence  of  him,  as  well  as  of  Fielding  and  of  Goldsmith ; 
and  the  general  method  of  the  narrative  resembles  that  of  our  old 
novelists  and  their  Spanish  and  French  predecessors.  Partly  for 
this  reason,  and  partly,  no  doubt,  because  of  the  rapidity  with 
which  the  story  was  written,  its  construction  is  weaker  than  is  usual 
even  with  Dickens's  earlier  works.  Coincidences  are  repeatedly 
employed  to  help  the  action ;  and  the  denouinent,  which,  besides 
turning  Mr.  S queers  into  a  thief,  reveals  Ralph  Nickleby  as  the 
father  of  Smike,  is  oppressively  complete.  As  to  the  practical  aim 
of  the  novel,  the  author's  word  must  be  taken  for  the  fact  that 

Mr.  Squeers  and  his  school  were  faint  and  feeble  pictures  of  an 
existing  reality,  purposely  subdued  and  kept  down  lest  they  should 
be  deemed  impossible."  The  exposure,  no  doubt,  did  good  in  its 
way,  though  perhaps  Mr.  Squeers,  in  a  more  or  less  modified  form, 
has  proved  a  tougher  adversary  to  overcome  than  Mrs.  Gamp. 

During  these  years  Dickens  was  chiefly  resident  in  the  modest 
locality  of  Doughty  Street,  whither  he  had  moved  his  household 
from  the  "three  rooms,"  "three  storeys  high,"  in  Furnival's  Inn, 


DICKENS. 


27 


early  in  1837.  It  was  not  till  the  end  of  1839  that  he  took  up  his 
abode  furtlier  west,  in  a  house  which  he  came  to  like  best  among 
all  his  London  habitations,  in  Devonshire  Terrace,  Regent's  Park. 
His  town  life  was,  however,  varied  by  long  rustications  at  Tv/ick- 
enham  and  at  Petersham,  and  by  sojourns  at  the  sea-side,  of  which 
he  was  a  most  consistent  votary.  He  is  found  in  various  years  of 
his  life  at  Brighton,  Dover,  and  Bonchurch  —  where  he  liked  his 
neighbours  better  than  he  liked  the  climate ;  and  in  later  years, 
when  he  had  grown  accustomed  to  the  Continent,  he  repeatedly 
domesticated  himself  at  Boulogne.  But  already  in  1837  he  had 
discovered  the  little  sea-side  village,  as  it  then  was,  which  for  many 
years  afterwards  became  his  favourite  holiday  retreat,  and  of  which 
he  would  be  the  o;enius  loci,  even  if  he  had  not  by  a  special  de- 
scription immortalised  Our  English  Watering-place.  Broadstairs 

—  whose  afternoon  tranquillity  even  to  this  day  is  undisturbed  ex- 
cept by  the  Ethiopians  on  their  tramp  from  Margate  to  Ramsgate 

—  and  its  constant  visitor,  are  thus  described  in  a  letter  wTitten  to 
an  American  friend  in  1843:  This  is  a  little  fishing-place;  in- 
tensely quiet ;  built  on  a  cliff  whereon,  in  the  centre  of  a  tiny 
semicircular  bay,  our  house  stands;  the  sea  rolling  and  dashing 
under  the  windows.  Seven  miles  out  are  the  Goodwin  Sands 
(you've  heard  of  the  Goodwin  Sands?),  whence  floating  lights 
perpetually  wink  after  dark,  as  if  they  were  carrying  on  intrigues 
with  the  servants.  Also  there  is  a  big  light-house  called  the  North 
Foreland  on  a  hill  beyond  the  village,  a  severe  parsonic  light, 
which  reproves  the  young  and  giddy  floaters,  and  stares  grimly  out 
upon  the  sea.  Under  the  cliff  are  rare  good  sands,  where  all  the 
children  assemble  every  morning  and  throw  up  impossible  forti- 
fications, which  the  sea  throws  down  again  at  high-vrater.  Old 
gentlemen  and  ancient  ladies  flirt  after  their  own  manner  in  two 
reading-rooms  and  on  a  great  many  scattered  seats  in  the  open  air. 
Other  old  gentlemen  look  all  day  through  telescopes  and  never  see 
anything.  In  a  bay-window  in  a  one-pair  sits,  from  nine  o'clock 
to  one,  a  gentleman  with  rather  long  hair  and  no  neckcloth,  who 
writes  and  grins  as  if  he  thought  he  were  very  funny  indeed.  His 
name  is  Boz." 

Not  a  few  houses  at  Broadstairs  may  boast  of  having  been  at  one 
time  or  another  inhabited  by  him  and  his.  Of  the  long-desired 
Fort  House,  however,  which  local  perverseness  triumphantly  points 
out  as  the  original  of  Bleak  House  (no  part  even  of  Bleak  House 
was  written  there,  though  part  of  David  Copperfield  was),  he  could 
not  obtain  possession  till  1850.  As  like  Bleak  House  as  it  is  like 
Chesney  Wold,  it  stands  at  the  very  highest  end  of  the  place,  looking 
straight  out  to  sea,  over  the  little  harbour  and  its  two  colliers,  with  a 
pleasant  stretch  of  cornfields  leading  along  the  cliff  towards  the 
light-house  which  Dickens  promised  Lord  Carlisle  should  serve  him 
as  a  night-light.  But  in  1837  Dickens  was  content  with  narrower 
quarters.  The  long  small  procession  of  sons  "  and  daughters 
had  as  yet  only  begun  with  the  birth  of  his  eldest  boy.  His  life 
was  simple  and  full  of  work,  and  occasional  sea-side  or  country 


28 


DICKENS, 


quarters,  and  now  and  then  a  brief  holiday  tour,  afforded  the  ne- 
cessary refreshment  of  change.  In  1837  he  made  his  first  short  trip 
abroad,  and  in  the  following  year,  accompanied  by  Mr.  Hablot 
Browne,  he  spent  a  week  of  enjoyment  in  Warwickshire,  noting 
in  his  Rejnembrancer :  "Stratford;  Shakspeare  ;  the  birthplace  ; 
visitors,  scribblers,  old  woman  (query  whether  she  knows  what 
Shakspeare  did),  etc.''  Meanwhile,  among  his  truest  home  enjoy- 
ments were  his  friendships.  They  were  few  in  number,  mostly 
with  men  for  whom,  after  he  had  once  taken  them  into  his  heart, 
he  preserved  a  life-long  regard.  Chief  of  all  these  were  John  For- 
ster  and  Daniel  Maclise,  the  high-minded  painter,  to  whom  we  owe 
a  charming  portrait  of  his  friend  in  this  youthful  period  of  his  life. 
Losing  them,  he  afterwards  wrote  when  absent  from  England,  was 
like  losing  my  arms  and  legs,  and  dull  and  tame  I  am  without 
you."  Besides  these,  he  was  at  this  time  on  very  friendly  terms 
with  William  Harrison  Ainsworth,  who  succeeded  him  in  the  edit- 
orship of  the  Miscellany^  and  concerning  whom  he  exclaimed  in 
his  Re7ne7nbrancer :  Ainsworth  has  a  fine  heart."  At  the  close 
of  1838,  Dickens,  Ainsworth,  and  Forster  constituted  themselves  a 
club  called  the  Trio,  and  afterwards  the  Cerberus.  Another  name 
frequent  in  the  Reme7nbra7icer  entries  is  that  of  Talfourd,  a  gen- 
erous friend,  in  whom,  as  Dickens  finely  said  after  his  death,  "  the 
success  of  other  men  made  as  little  chano^e  as  his  own."  All  these, 
together  with  Stanfield,  the  Landseers,  Douglas  Jerrold,  Macready, 
and  others  less  knov/n  to  fame,  were  among  the  friends  and  asso- 
ciates of  Dickens's  prime.  The  letters,  too,  remaining  from  this 
part  of  Dickens's  life,  have  all  the  same  tone  of  unaffected  frank- 
ness. With  some  of  his  intimate  friends  he  had  his  established 
epistolary  jokes.  Stanfield,  the  great  marine  painter,  he  pertina- 
ciously treated  as  a  '*very  salt"  correspondent,  communications  to 
whom,  as  to  a  "block-reeving,  main-brace-splicing,  lead-heaving, 
ship-conning,  stun'sail-bending,  deck-swabbing  son  of  a  sea-cook," 
needed  garnishing  with  the  obscurest  technicalities  and  strangest 
oaths  of  his  element.  (It  is  touching  to  turn  from  these  friendly 
buffooneries  to  a  letter  written  by  Dickens  many  years  afterward 
—  in  1867  —  and  mentioning  a  visit  to  "poor  dear  Stanfield," when 
"  it  was  clear  that  the  shadow  of  the  end  had  fallen  on  him.  .  .  . 
It  happened  well  that  I  had  seen,  on  a  wild  day  at  Tynemouth,  a 
remarkable  sea  effect,  of  which  I  wrote  a  description  to  him,  and 
he  had  kept  it  under  his  pillow.")  Macready,  after  his  retirement 
from  the  stage,  is  bantered  on  the  score  of  his  juvenility  with  a  per- 
tinacity of  fun  recalling  similar  whimsicalities  of  Charles  Lamb's ; 
or  the  jest  is  changed,  and  the  great  London  actor  in  his  rural  re- 
treat is  depicted  in  the  character  of  a  country  gentleman  strange  to 
the  wicked  ways  of  the  town.  As  in  the  case  of  many  delightful 
letter-writers,  the  charm  of  Dickens  as  a  correspondent  vanishes  so 
soon  as  he  becomes  self-conscious.  Even  in  his  letters  to  Lady 
Blessington  and  Mrs.  Watson,  a  striving  after  effect  is  at  times 
perceptible ;  the  homage  rendered  to  Lord  John  Russell  is  not 
offered  with  a  light  hand ;  on  the  contrary,  when  writing  to  Doug- 


DICKENS. 


29 


las  Jerrold,  Dickens  is  occasionally  so  intent  upon  proving  himself 
a  sound  Radical  that  his  vehemence  all  but  passes  into  a  shriek. 

In  these  early  years,  at  all  events,  Dickens  was  happy  in  the 
society  of  his  chosen  friends.  His  favourite  amusements  were  a 
country  walk  or  ride  with  Forster,  or  a  dinner  at  Jack  Straw's 
Castle  with  him  and  Maclise.  He  was  likewise  happy  at  home. 
Here,  however,  in  the  very  innermost  circle  of  his  affections,  he  had 
to  suffer  the  first  great  personal  grief  of  his  life.  His  younger  sister- 
in-law,  Miss  Mary  Hogarth,  had  accompanied  him  and  his  wife  into 
their  new  abode  in  Doughty  Street,  and  here,  in  May,  1837,  she 
died,  at  the  early  age  of  seventeen.  No  sorrow  seems  ever  to  have 
touched  the  heart  and  possessed  the  imagination  of  Charles  Dickens 
like  that  for  the  loss  of  this  dearly  loved  girl,  *' young,  beautiful, 
and  good."  I  can  solemnly  say,"  he  wrote  to  her  mother  a  few 
months  after  her  death,  '*that,  waking  or  sleeping,  I  have  never 
lost  the  recollection  of  our  hard  trial  and  sorrow,  and  I  feel  that  I 
never  shall."  If,"  ran  part  of  his  first  entry  in  the  Diary  which  he 
began  on  the  first  day  of  the  following  year,  "  she  were  with  us  now, 
the  same  winning,  happy,  amiable  companion,  sympathising  with 
all  my  thoughts  and  feelings  more  than  any  one  I  knew  ever  did  or 
will,  I  think  I  should  have  nothing  to  wish  for  but  a  continuance  of 
such  happiness.  But  she  is  gone,  and  pray  God  I  may  one  day, 
through  his  mercy,  rejoin  her."  It  was  not  till,  in  after  years,  it 
became  necessary  to  abandon  the  project,  that  he  ceased  to  cherish 
the  intention  of  being  buried  by  her  side,  and  through  life  the 
memory  of  her  haunted  him  with  strange  vividness.  At  the  Niagara 
Falls,  when  the  spectacle  of  Nature  in  her  glory  had  produced  in 
him,  as  he  describes  it,  a  wondrously  tranquil  and  happy  peace  of 
mind,  he  longed  for  the  presence  of  his  dearest  friends,  and  I  was 
going  to  add,  what  would  I  give  if  the  dear  girl,  whose  ashes  lie  in 
Kensal  Green,  had  lived  to  come  so  far  along  with  us ;  but  she  has 
been  here  many  times,  I  doubt  not,  since  her  sweet  face  faded  from 
my  earthly  sight."  "After  she  died,"  he  wrote  to  her  mother  in 
May,  1843,  "I  dreamed  of  her  every  night  for  many  weeks,  and 
always  with  a  kind  of  quiet  happiness,  which  became  so  pleasant  to 
me  that  I  never  lay  down  at  night  without  a  hope  of  the  vision  com- 
ing back  in  one  shape  or  other.  And  so  it  did."  Once  he  dreamt 
of  her,  when  travelling  in  Yorkshire  ;  and  then,  after  an  interval  of 
many  months,  as  he  lay  asleep  one  night  at  Genoa,  it  seemed  to  him 
as  if  her  spirit  visited  him  and  spoke  to  him  in  words  which  he  after- 
wards precisely  remembered,  when  he  had  awaked,  with  the  tears 
running  down  his  face.  He  never  forgot  her,  and  in  the  year  before 
he  died  he  wrote  to  his  friend :  She  is  so  much  in  my  thoughts  at 
all  times,  especially  when  I  am  successful  and  have  greatly  pros- 
pered in  anything,  that  the  recollection  of  her  is  an  essential  part 
of  my  being,  and  is  as  inseparable  from  my  existence  as  the  beating: 
of  my  heart  is!"  In  a  word,  she  was  the  object  of  the  one  great 
imaginative  passion  of  his  life.  Many  have  denied  that  theVe  is 
any  likeness  to  nature  in  the  fictitious  figure  in  which,  according 
to  the  wont  of  imaginative  workers,  he  was  irresistibly  impelled  to 


30 


DICKENS, 


embody  the  sentiment  with  which  she  inspired  him  ;  but  the  sen- 
timent itself  became  part  of  his  nature,  and  part  of  his  history. 
When  in  writing  the  Old  Curiosity  Shop  he  approached  the  death 
of  Little  Nell,  he  shrunk  from  the  task:  **Dear  Mary  died  yester- 
day, when  I  think  of  this  sad  story." 

The  Old  Curiosity  S/iop  \ra.s  long  been  freed  from  the  encum- 
brances which  originally  surrounded  it,  and  there  is  little  except 
biographical  interest  in  the  half-forgotten  history  of  Master  Hum- 
phrey''s  Clock,  Early  in  the  year  1840,  his  success  and  confidence 
in  his  powers  induced  him  to  undertake  an  illustrated  weekly  jour- 
nal, in  which  he  depended  solely  on  his  own  name,  and,  in  the  first 
instance,  on  his  own  efforts,  as  a  writer. .  Such  was  his  trust  in  his 
versatility  that  he  did  not  think  it  necessary  even  to  open  with  a 
continuous  story.  Perhaps  the  popularity  of  the  Pickwick  Papers 
encouraged  him  to  adopt  the  time-honoured  device  of  wrapping  up 
several  tales  in  one.  In  any  case,  his  framework  was  in  the  present 
instance  too  elaborate  to  take  hold  of  the  public  mind,  while  the 
characters  introduced  into  it  possessed  little  or  nothing  of  the 
freshness  of  their  models  in  the  Taller  and  the  Spectator,  In 
order  to  re-enforce  Master  Humphrey,  the  deaf  gentleman,  and 
the  other  original  members  of  his  benevolent  conclave,  he  hereupon 
resorted  to  a  natural,  but  none  the  less  unhappy,  expedient.  Mr. 
Pickwick  was  revived,  together  with  Sam  Weller  and  his  parent ; 
and  a  Weller  of  the  third  generation  was  brought  on  the  stage  in 
the  person  of  a  precocious  four-year-old,  "standing  with  his  little 
legs  very  wide  apart  as  if  the  top-boots  were  familiar  to  them,  and 
actually  winking  upon  the  housekeeper  with  his  infant  eye,  in  imita- 
tion of  his  grandfather."  A  laugh  may  have  been  raised  at  the  time 
by  this  attempt,  from  which,  however,  every  true  Pickwickian  must 
have  turned  sadly  away.  Nor  was  there  much  in  the  other  contents 
of  these  early  numbers  to  make  up  for  the  disappointment.  As, 
therefore,  neither  "  Master  Humphrey's  Clock"  nor  "  Mr.  W^eller's 
Watch"  seemed  to  promise  any  lasting  success,  it  was  prudently 
determined  that  the  story  of  the  Old  Curiosity  Shop,  of  which  the 
first  portion  had  appeared  in  the  fourth  number  of  the  periodical, 
should  run  on  continuously  ;  and  when  this  had  been  finished,  a  very 
short  "link"  sufficed  to  introduce  another  story,  Barnaby  Rudore^ 
with  the  close  of  which  Master  Hu7nphrey''s  Clock  likewise 
stopped. 

In  the  Old  Curiosity  Shop,  though  it  abounds  in  both  grotesquely 
terrible  and  boisterously  laughable  effects,  the  key-note  is  that  of 
an  idyllic  pathos.  The  sense  of  this  takes  hold  of  the  reader  at  the 
very  outset,  as  he  lingers  over  the  picture,  with  which  the  first 
chapter  concludes,  of  little  Nell  asleep  through  the  solitary  night  in 
the  curiosity-dealer's  warehouse.  It  retains  possession  of  him  as 
he  accompanies  the  innocent  heroine  through  her  wanderings, 
pausing  with  her  in  the  church-yard  where  all  is  quiet  save  the 
cawing  of  the  satirical  rooks,  or  in  the  school-master's  cottage  by 
the  open  window,  through  which  is  borne  upon  the  evening^  air  the 
distant  hum  of  the  boys  at  play  upon  the  green,  while  the  poor 


DICKENS. 


31 


school-master  holds  in  his  hand  the  small  cold  one  of  the  little 
scholar  that  has  fallen  asleep.  Nor  is  it  absent  to  the  last  when 
Nell  herself  lies  at  rest  in  her  little  bed.  Her  little  bird  —  a  poor 
slight  thing  the  pressure  of  a  finger  would  have  crushed  —  was  stir- 
ring nimbly  in  its  cage ;  and  the  strong  heart  of  its  child-mistress 
was  mute  and  motionless  forever."  The  hand  which  drew  Little 
Nell  afterwards  formed  other  figures  not  less  affecting,  but  none  so 
essentially  poetic.  Like  many  such  characters,  this  requires,  for  its 
full  appreciation,  a  certain  tension  of  the  mind  ;  and  those  who  will 
not,  or  cannot,  pass  in  some  measure  out  of  themselves,  will  be 
likely  to  tire  of  the  conception,  or  to  declare  its  execution  artificial. 
Curiously  enough,  not  only  was  Little  Nell  a  favourite  of  Landor,  a 
poet  and  critic  utterly  averse  from  meretricious  art,  but  she  also 
deeply  moved  the  sympathy  of  Lord  Jeffrey,  who  at  least  knew  his 
own  mind,  and  spoke  it  in  both  praise  and  blame.  As  already 
stated,  Dickens  only  with  difficulty  brought  himself  to  carry  his 
story  to  its  actual  issue,  though  it  is  hard  to  believe  that  he  could 
ever  have  intended  a  different  close  from  that  which  he  gave  to  it. 
His  whole  heart  was  in  the  story,  nor  could  he  have  consoled  him- 
self by  means  of  an  ordinary  happy  ending. 

Dickens's  comic  humour  never  flowed  in  a  pleasanter  vein  than 
in  the  Old' Cicriosity  Shop,  and  nowhere  has  it  a  more  exquisite  ele- 
ment of  pathos  in  it.  The  shock-headed,  red-cheeked  Kit  is  one  of 
the  earliest  of  those  ungainly  figures  who  speedily  find  their  way  into 
our  affections  —  the  odd  family  to  which  Mr.  Toots,  Tom  Pinch, 
Tommy  Traddles,  and  Joe  Gargery  alike  belong.  But  the  triumph 
of  this  serio-comic  form  of  art  in  the  Old  Curiosity  Shop  is  to  be 
found  in  the  later  experiences  of  Dick  Swiveller,  who  seems  at  first 
merely  a  more  engaging  sample  of  the  Bob  Sawyer  species,  but  who 
ends  by  endearing  himself  to  the  most  thoughtless  laugher.  Dick 
Swiveller  and  his  protegee  have  gained  a  lasting  place  among  the 
favourite  characters  of  English  fiction,  and  the  privations  of  the 
Marchioness  have  possibly  had  a  result  which  would  have  been 
that  most  coveted  by  Dickens  —  that  of  helping  towards  the  better 
treatment  of  a  class  whose  lot  is  among  the  dust  and  ashes,  too 
often  very  bitter  ashes,  of  many  households.  Besides  these,  the 
story  contains  a  variety  of  incidental  characters  of  a  class  which 
Dickens  never  grew  weary  of  drawing  from  the  life.  Messrs.  Cod- 
lin,  Short,  and  Company,  and  the  rest  of  the  itinerant  showmen, 
seem  to  have  come  straight  from  the  most  real  of  country  fairs ; 
and  if  ever  a  troupe  of  comedians  deserved  pity  on  their  wanderings 
through  a  callous  world,  it  was  the  most  diverting  and  the  most 
dismal  of  all  the  mountebanks  that  gathered  round  the  stew  of  tripe 
in  the  kitchen  of  The  Jolly  Sandboys  —  Jerry's  performing  dogs. 

"*Your  people  don't  usually  travel  in  character,  do  they?'  said  Short,  pcint- 
ing  to  the  dresses  of  the  dogs.    ^  It  must  come  expensive  if  they  do.' 

"'No,'  replied  Jerry  — 'no.  it's  not  the  custom  with  us.  But  we've  been 
playing  a  little  on  the  road  to-day,  and  we  come  out  with  a  new  wardrobe,  at  the 
races,  so  I  didn  t  think  it  worth  while  to  stop  to  undress.    Dov.n,  Pedro ! '  " 


32 


DICKENS, 


In  addition  to  these  public  servants  we  have  a  purveyof  of  diver- 
sion—  or  instruction  —  of  an  altogether  different  stamp.  Does 
the  caravan  look  as  if  it  know'd  em  ? "  indignantly  demands  the 
proprietress  of  Jarley's  wax-work,  when  asked  whether  she  is 
acquainted  with  the  men  of  the  Punch  show.  She  too  is  drawn,  or 
moulded,  in  the  author's  most  exuberant  style  of  fun,  together  with 
her  company,  in  which  **  all  the  gentlemen  were  very  pigeon- 
breasted  and  very  blue  about  the  beards,  and  all  the  ladies  were 
miraculous  figures ;  and  all  the  ladies  and  all  the  gentlemen  were 
looking  intensely  nowhere,  and  staring  with  extraordinary  earnest- 
ness at  nothing."" 

In  contrast  with  these  genial  products  of  observation  and  humour 
stand  the  grotesquely  hideous  personages  who  play  important  parts 
in  the  machinery  of  the  story,  the  vicious  dwarf  Quilp  and  the  mon- 
strous virago  Sally  Brass.  The  former  is  among  the  most  success- 
ful attempts  of  Dickens  in  a  direction  which  was  full  of  danger  for 
him,  as  it  is  for  all  writers ;  the  malevolent  little  demon  is  so 
blended  with  his  surroundings  —  the  description  of  which  forms 
one  of  the  author's  most  telling  pictures  of  the  lonely  foulnesses  of 
the  river-side  —  that  his  life  seems  natura.1  in  its  way,  and  his  death 
a  most  appropriate  ending  to  it,  Sally  Brass,  whose  accomplish- 
ments were  all  of  a  masculine  and  strictly  legal  kind,"  is  less  of  a 
caricature,  and  not  without  a  humorously  redeeming  point  of  fem- 
inine weakness ;  yet  the  end  of  her  and  her  brother  is  described  at 
the  close  of  the  book  with  almost  tragic  earnestness.  On  the  whole, 
though  the  poetic  sympathy  of  Dickens  when  he  wrote  this  book 
was  absorbed  in  the  character  of  his  heroine,  yet  his  genius  rarely 
asserted  itself  after  a  more  diversified  fashion. 

Of  Barnaby  Riidge^  though  in  my  opinion  an  excellent  book 
after  its  kind,  I  may  speak  more  briefly.  With  the  exception  of 
A  Tale  of  Two  Cities,  it  was  Dickens's  only  attempt  in  the  histori- 
cal novel.  In  the  earlier  work  the  relation  between  the  foreground 
and  background  of  the  story  is  skilfully  contrived,  and  the  colouring 
of  the  whole,  without  any  elaborate  attempt  at  accurate  fidelity, 
has  a  generally  true  and  harmonious  effect.  With  the  help  of  her 
portrait  by  a  painter  (Mr.  Frith)  for  whose  pictures  Dickens  had 
a  great  liking,  Dolly  Varden  has  justly  taken  hold  of  the  popular 
fancy  as  a  charming  type  of  a  pretty  girl  of  a  century  ago.  And 
some  of  the  local  descriptions  in  the  early  part  of  the  book  are 
hardly  less  pleasing :  the  Temple  in  summer,  as  it  was  before  the 
charm  of  Fountain  Court  was  destroyed  by  its  guardians ;  and  the 
picturesque  comforts  of  the  Maypole  Inn,  described  beforehand,  by 
way  of  contrast  to  the  desecration  of  its  central  sanctuary.  The 
intrigue  of  the  story  is  fairly  interesting  in  itself,  and  the  gentle- 
manly villain  who  plays  a  principal  part  in  it,  though,  as  usual, 
over-elaborated,  is  drawn  with  more  skill  than  Dickens  usually  dis- 
plays in  such  characters.  After  the  main  interest  of  the  book  has 
passed  to  the  historical  action  of  the  George  Gordon  riots,  the 
story  still  retains  its  coherence,  and,  a  few  minor  improbabilities 
apart,  is  successfully  conducted  to  its  close.    No  historical  novel 


DICKENS. 


33 


can  altogether  avoid  the  banalities  of  the  species ;  and  though 
Dickens,  like  all  the  world,  had  his  laugh  at  the  late  Mr.  G.  P.  R. 
James,  he  is  constrained  to  introduce  the  historical  hero  of  the  tale, 
with  his  confidential  adviser,  and  his  attendant,  in  the  familiar 
guise  of  three  horsemen.  As  for  Lord  George  Gordon  himself,  and 
the  riots  of  which  the  responsibility  remains  inseparable  from  his 
unhappy  memory,  the  representation  of  them  in  the  novel  suffi- 
ciently accords  both  with  poetic  probability  and  with  historical  fact. 
The  poor  lord's  evil  genius,  indeed,  Gashford  —  who  has  no  his- 
torical origin  —  tries  the  reader's  sense  of  verisimilitude  rather 
hard;  such  converts  are  uncommon  except  among  approvers. 
The  Protestant  hangman,  on  the  other  hand,  has  some  slight  his- 
torical warranty ;  but  the  leading  part  which  he  is  made  to  play  in 
the  riots,  and  his  resolution  to  go  any  lengths  "in  support  of  the 
great  Protestant  principle  of  hanging,"  overshoot  the  mark.  It 
cannot  be  said  that  there  is  any  substantial  exaggeration  in  the 
description  of  the  riots ;  thus,  the  burning  of  the  great  distiller's 
house  in  Holborn  is  a  well-authenticated  fact ;  and  there  is  abun- 
dant vigour  in  the  narrative.  Repetition  is  unavoidable  in  treating 
such  a  theme,  but  in  Baniaby  Riidge  it  is  not  rendered  less  endur- 
able by  mannerism,  nor  puffed  out  with  rhetoric. 

One  very  famous  character  in  this  story  was,  as  personages  in 
historical  novels  often  are,  made  up  out  of  two  originals. i  This 
was  Grip  the  Raven,  who,  after  seeing  the  idiot  hero  of  the  tale 
safe  through  his  adventures,  resumed  his  addresses  on  the  subject 
of  the  kettle  to  the  horses  in  the  stable;  and  who,  *'as  he  was  a 
mere  infant  when  Barnaby  was  gray,  has  very  probably  gone  on  talk- 
ing to  the  present  time."  In  a  later  preface  to  Barnaby  Rudge, 
Dickens,  wdth  infinite  humour,  related  his  experiences  of  the  two 
originals  in  question,  and  how  he  had  been  ravenless  since  the 
mournful  death  before  the  kitchen  fire  of  the  second  of  the  pair, 
the  Grip  of  actual  life.  This  occurred  in  the  house  at  Devonshire 
Terrace,  into  which  the  family  had  moved  two  years  before  (in 
1839). 

As  Dickens's  fame  advanced  his  circle  of  acquaintances  was  neces- 
sarily widened ;  and  in  1841  he  was  invited  to  visit  Edinburgh,  and 
to  receive  there  the  first  great  tribute  of  public  recognition  which  had 
been  paid  to  him.  He  was  entertained  with  great  enthusiasm  at  a 
public  banquet,  voted  the  freedom  of  the  city,  and  so  overwhelmed 
with  hospitalities  that,  notwithstanding  his  frank  pleasure  in  these 
honours,  he  w^as  glad  to  make  his  escape  at  last,  and  refreshed  him- 
self with  a  tour  in  the  Highlands.  These  excitements  may  have 
intensified  in  him  a  desire  which  had  for  some  time  been  active  in 
his  mind,  and  which  in  any  case  would  have  been  kept  alive  by  an 
incessant  series  of  invitations.    He  had  signed  an  agreement  with 

^  As  there  is  hardly  a  character  in  the  whole  world  of  fiction  and  the  drama  without 
some  sort  of  a  literary  predecessor,  so  Dickens  may  have  derived  the  first  notion  of 
Grip  from  the  raven  Ralpho  —  likewise  the  property  of  an  idiot  —  who  frightened 
Roderick  Random  and  Strap  out  of  their  wits,  and  into  the  belief  that  he  ivas  the  per- 
sonage Grip  so  persistently  declared  himself  to  be. 


34 


DICKENS, 


his  publishers  for  a  new  book  before  this  desire  took  the  shape  of 
an  actual  resolution.  There  is  no  great  difficulty  in  understanding 
why  Dickens  made  up  his  mind  to  go  to  America,  and  thus  to  inter- 
rupt for  the  moment  a  course  of  life  and  work  which  was  fast  lead- 
ing him  on  to  great  heights  of  fame  and  fortune.  The  question  of 
international  copyright  alone  would  hardly  have  induced  him  to 
cross  the  seas.  Probably  he  felt  instinctively  that  to  see  men  and 
cities  was  part  of  the  training  as  well  as  of  the  recreation  which 
his  genius  required.  Dickens  was  by  nature  one  of  those  artists 
who  when  at  work  always  long  to  be  in  sympathy  with  their  public, 
and  to  know  it  to  be  in  sympathy  with  them.  And  hitherto  he  had 
not  met  more  than  part  of  his  public  of  readers  face  to  face. 


DICKENS, 


35 


CHAPTER  III. 

STRANGE  LANDS. 
[1842-1847.] 

A  JOURNEY  across  the  Atlantic  in  midwinter  is  no  child's  play 
even  at  the  present  day,  when,  bad  though  their  passage  may  have 
been,  few  people  would  venture  to  confess  doubts,  as  Dickens  did, 
concerning  the  safety  of  such  a  voyage  by  steam  in  heavy  weather. 
The  travellers  —  for  Dickens  was  accompanied  by  his  wife  —  had 
an  exceptionally  rough  crossing,  the  horrors  of  which  he  has  de- 
scribed in  his  American  Notes,  His  powers  of  observation  were 
alive  in  the  midst  of  the  lethargy  of  sea-sickness,  and  when  he 
could  not  watch  others  he  found  enough  amusement  in  watching 
himself.  At  last,  on  January  28,  1842,  they  found  themselves  in 
Boston  harbour.  Their  stay  in  the  United  States  lasted  about  four 
months,  during  which  time  they  saw  Boston,  New  York,  Philadel- 
phia, Baltimore,  Washington,  Richmond,  Cincinnati,  St.  Louis, 
Chicago,  and  Buffalo.  Then  they  passed  by  Niagara  into  Can- 
ada, and  after  a  pleasant  visit  to  Montreal,  diversified  by  private 
theatricals  with  the  officers  there,  were  safe  at  home  again  in  July. 

Dickens  had  met  v/ith  an  enthusiastic  welcome  in  every  part  of 
the  States  where  he  had  not  gone  out  of  the  way  of  it ;  in  New 
York,  in  particular,  he  had  been  feted,  with  a  fervour  unique  even 
in  the  history  of  American  enthusiasms,  under  the  resounding  title 
of '*the  Guest  of  the  Nation.*"  Still,  even  this  imposed  no  moral 
obligation  upon  him  to  take  the  advice  tendered  to  him  in  Amer- 
ica, and  to  avoid  writing  about  that  country — we  are  so  very 
suspicious."  On  the  other  hand,  whatever  might  be  his  indigna- 
tion at  the  obstinate  unwillingness  of  the  American  public  to  be 
moved  a  hair's-breadth  by  his  championship  of  the  cause  of  inter- 
national copyright, 1  this  failure  could  not,  in  a  mind  so  reasonable 
as  his,  have  outweighed  the  remembrance  of  the  kindness  showni  to 
him  and  to  his  fame.  But  the  truth  seems  to  be  that  he  had,  if  not 
at  first,  at  least  very  speedily,  taken  a  dislike  to  American  ways 
which  proved  too  strong  for  him  to  the  last.  In  strange  lands, 
most  of  all  in  a  country  which,  like  the  United  States,  is  not  in  the 
least  ashamed  to  be  what  it  is,  travellers  are  necessarily  at  the  out- 

1  After  dining  at  a  party  including  the  son  of  an  eminent  man  of  letters,  he  notes  in 
his  Remembrancer  \}ixsiX  he  found  the  great  man's  son  "decidedly  lumpish/'  and  appends 
the  reflexion,    Copyrights  need  be  hereditary,  for  genius  isn't." 


36 


DICKENS. 


set  struck  by  details ;  and  Dickens's  habit  of  minute  observation 
was  certain  not  to  let  him  lose  many  of  them.  He  was  neither 
long  enough  in  the  country  to  study  very  closely,  nor  was  it  in  his 
way  to  ponder  very  deeply,  the  problems  involved  in  the  existence 
of  many  of  the  institutions  with  which  he  found  fault.  Thus,  he 
was  indignant  at  the  sight  of  slavery,  and  even  ventured  to  tell  a 
piece  of  his  mind  on  the  subject  to  a  judge  in  the  South ;  but 
when,  twenty  years  later,  the  great  struggle  came,  at  the  root  of 
which  this  question  lay,  his  sympathies  were  with  the  cause  of  dis- 
union and  slavery  in  its  conflict  with  the  mad  and  villanous  " 
North.  In  short,  his  knowledge  of  America  and  its  affairs  was 
gained  in  such  a  way  and  under  such  circumstances  as  to  entitle 
him,  if  he  chose,  to  speak  to  the  vast  public  which  he  commanded 
as  an  author  of  men  and  manners  as  observed  by  him ;  but  he  had 
no  right  to  judge  the  destinies  and  denounce  the  character  of  a 
great  people  on  evidence  gathered  in  the  course  of  a  holiday  tour. 

Nor,  indeed,  did  the  Ainerica7t  Notes ^  published  by  him  after  his 
return  home,  furnish  any  serious  cause  of  offence.  In  an  introduc- 
tory chapter,  which  was  judiciously  suppressed,  he  had  taken  credit 
for  the  book  as  not  having  a  grain  of  any  political  ingredient  in 
its  whole  composition."  Indeed,  the  contents  were  rather  disap- 
pointing from  their  meagreness.  The  author  showed  good  taste  in 
eschewing  all  reference  to  his  personal  reception,  and  good  judgment 
in  leaving  the  copyright  question  undiscussed.  But  though  his  de- 
scriptions were  as  vivid  as  usual  —  whether  of  -the  small  steamboat, 
**of  about  half  a  pony  power,"  on  the  Connecticut  river,  or  of  the 
dismal  scenery  on  the  Mississippi,  great  father  of  rivers,  who 
(praise  be  to  Heaven)  has  no  young  children  like  him!"  —  and 
though  some  of  the  figure-sketches  were  touched  off  with  the  hap- 
piest of  hands,  yet  the  public,  even  in  1842,  was  desirous  to  learn 
something  more  about  America  than  this.  It  is  true  that  Dickens 
had,  with  his  usual  conscientiousness,  examined  and  described 
various  interesting  public  institutions  in  the  States  —  prisons,  asy- 
lums, and  the  like;  but  the  book  was  not  a  very  full  one;  it  was 
hardly  anything  but  a  sketch-book,  with  more  humour,  but  with 
infinitely  less  poetic  spirit,  than  the  Sketch-book  of  the  illustrious 
American  author,  whose  friendship  had  been  one  of  the  chief 
personal  gains  of  Dickens's  journey. 

The  American  Notes,  for  which  the  letters  to  Forster  had  fur- 
nished ample  materials,  were  published  in  the  year  of  Dickens's  re- 
turn, after  he  had  refreshed  himself  v/ith  a  merry  Cornish  trip  in  the 
company  of  his  old  friend,  and  his  two  other  intimates,  *'Stanny" 
and  Mac."  But  he  had  not  come  home,  as  he  had  not  gone  out, 
to  be  idle.  On  the  first  day  of  the  following  year,  1843,  appeared 
the  first  number  of  the  story  wliich  was  to  furnish  the  real  casus 
disc7'i77iinis  between  Dickens  and  the  enemies,  as  well,  no  doubt,  as 
a  very  large  proportion  of  the  friends,  whom  he  had  left  behind  him 
across  the  water.  The  American  scenes  in  Martt7i  Chiizzlewit  did 
not,  it  is  true,  begin  till  the  fifth  number  of  the  story ;  nor  is  it 
prolDable,  from  the  accounts  of  the  sale,  which  was  much  smaller 


DICKENS. 


37 


than  Dickens  had  expected,  that  these  particular  episodes  at  first 
produced  any  strong  feeling  in  the  English  public.  But  the  merits 
of  the  book  gradually  obtained  for  it  a  popularity  at  home  which 
has  been  surpassed  by  that  of  but  one  or  two  other  of  Dickens\s 
works  ;  and  in  proportion  to  this  popularity  was  the  effect  exercised 
by  its  American  chapters.  What  that  effect  has  been,  it  would  be 
hypocrisy  to  question. 

Dickens,  it  is  very  clear,  had  been  unable  to  resist  the  temptation 
of  at  once  drawing  upon  the  vast  addition  to  his  literary  capital  as 
a  humourist.  That  the  satire  of  many  of  the  American  scenes  in 
Martin  CJnizzlewit  is,  as  satire,  not  less  true  than  telling,  it  needs 
but  a  small  acquaintance  with  American  journalism  and  oratory 
even  at  the  present  day  to  perceive ;  and  the  heartrending  history 
of  Eden,  as  a  type  of  some  of  the  settlements  "  vaunted  in  England 
as  a  mine  of  Golden  Hope,^'  at  least  had  the  w^arrant  of  something 
more  than  hearsay  and  a  look  in  passing.  Nor,  as  has  already 
been  observed,  would  it  have  been  in  accordance  either  with 
human  nature  or  with  the  fitness  of  things,  had  Dickens  allowed 
liis  welcome  in  America  to  become  to  him  (as  he  termed  it  in  the 
suppressed  Preface  to  Notes)  *'an  iron  muzzle  disguised  be- 
neath a  flower  or  two."  But  the  frankness,  to  say  the  least,  of  the 
mirror  into  which  he  now  invited  his  late  hosts  to  gaze  was  not 
likely  to  produce  grateful  compliments  to  its  presenter,  nor  was  the 
effect  softened  by  the  dispatch  with  which  this  soitvenh'  of  the 

guest  of  the  nation"  was  pressed  upon  its  attention.  No  doubt 
it  would  have  been  easy  to  reflect  that  only  the  evil,  not  the  good, 
sides  of  social  life  in  America  were  held  up  to  derision  and  con- 
tempt, and  that  an  honourable  American  journalist  had  no  more 
right  to  resent  the  portraiture  of  Mr.  Jefferson  Brick  than  a  \irtu- 
ous  English  paterfamilias  had  to  quarrel  with  that  of  Mr.  Pecksniff. 
Unfortunately,  offence  is  usually  taken  where  offence  is  meant ;  and 
there  can  be  little  doubt  as  to  the  animits  with  which  Dickens  had 
written.  Only  two  months  after  landing  at  Boston  Dickens  had 
declared  to  Macready,  that  however  much  he  liked  the  ingredi- 
ents of  this  great  dish,  he  could  not  but  say  that  the  dish  itself 
went  against  the  grain  with  him,  and  he  didn't  like  it."  It  was  not, 
and  could  not  be,  pleasant  for  Americans  to  find  the  '•'New  Y^ork 
Sewer,  in  its  twelfth  thousand,  with  a  whole  column  of  New  Yorkers 
to  be  shown  up,  and  all  their  names  printed,"  introduced  as  the 
first  expression  of  the  bubbling  passions  of  their  country  ;  "  or  to 
be  certified,  apropos  of  a  conversation  among  American  ^'  gentlemen  " 
after  dinner,  that  dollars,  and  dollars  only,  at  the  risk  of  honesty 
and  honour,  filled  their  souls.  *'No  satirist,"  Martin  Chuzziewit 
is  told  by  a  candid  and  open-minded  American,  could,  I  believe, 
breathe  this  air."  But  satire  in  such  passages  as  these  borders  too 
closely  on  angry  invective ;  and  neither  the  irresistible  force  nor  the 
earnest  pathos  of  the  details  which  follow  can  clear  away  the  sus- 
picion that  at  the  bottom  lay  a  desire  to  depreciate.  Nor  was  the 
general  effect  of  the  American  episodes  in  Martin  Chuszlewit 
materially  modified  by  their  conclusion,  to  which,  with  the  best  of 


38 


DICKENS. 


intentions,  the  author  could  not  bring  himself  to  give  a  genuinely 
complimentary  turn.  The  Americans  did  not  like  all  this,  and 
could  not  be  expected  to  like  it.  The  tone  of  the  whole  satire  was 
too  savage,  and  its  tenor  was  too  hopelessly  one-sided,  for  it  to  pass 
unresented ;  while  much  in  it  was  too  near  the  truth  to  glance  off 
harmless.  It  is  well  known  that  in  time  Dickens  came  himself 
to  understand  this.  Before  quitting  America,  in  1868,  he  declared 
his  intention  to  publish  in  every  future  edition  of  his  American 
Notes  and  Martin  Chuzzlewit  his  testimony  to  the  magnanimous 
cordiality  of  his  second  reception  in  the  States,  and  to  the  amazing 
changes  for  the  better  which  he  had  seen  everywhere  around  him 
during  his  second  sojourn  in  the  country.  But  it  is  not  likely  that 
the  postscript,  all  the  more  since  it  was  added  under  circumstances 
so  honourable  to  both  sides,  has  undone,  or  will  undo,  the  effect  of 
the  text.  Very  possibly  the  Americans  may,  in  the  eyes  of  the 
English  people  as  well  as  in  their  own,  cease  to  be  chargeable 
with  the  faults  and  foibles  satirised  by  Dickens ;  but  the  satire 
itself  will  live,  and  v/ill  continue  to  excite  laughter  and  loathing, 
together  with  the  other  satire  of  the  powerful  book  to  which  it 
belongs. 

For  in  none  of  his  books  is  that  power,  which  at  times  filled  their 
author  himself  with  astonishment,  more  strikingly  and  abundantly 
revealed  than  in  The  Life  and  Adveiitnres  of  Martin  Chnzzleivit, 
Never  was  his  inventive  force  more  flexible  and  more  at  his  com- 
mand ;  yet  none  of  his  books  cost  him  more  hard  work.  The  very 
names  of  hero  and  novel  were  only  the  final  fortunate  choice  out  of 
a  legion  of  notions  ;  though  '*  Pecksniff"  as  well  as  '*  Charity"  and 

Mercy"  not  unholy  names,  I  hope,"  said  Mr.  Pecksniff  to  Mrs. 
Todgers)  v/ere  first  inspirations.  The  MS.  text  too  is  full  of  the 
outward  signs  of  care.  But  the  author  had  his  reward  in  the  gen- 
eral impression  of  finish  which  is  conveyed  by  this  book  as  com- 
pared with  its  predecessors  ;  so  that  Martin  Chuzzlewit  may  be 
described  as  already  one  of  the  masterpieces  of  Dickens's  maturity 
as  a  writer.  Oddly  enough,  the  one  part  of  the  book  which  moves 
rather  heavily  is  the  opening  chapter,  an  effort  in  the  mock-heroic, 
probably  suggested  by  the  author's  eighteenth  century  readings. 

A  more  original  work,  however,  than  Mariioi  Chuzzlewit  was 
never  composed,  or  one  which  more  freshly  displays  the  most  char- 
acteristic qualities  of  its  author's  genius.  Though  the  actual  con- 
struction of  the  story  is  anything  but  faultless  —  for  what  could  be 
more  slender  than  the  thread  by  which  the  American  interlude 
is  attached  to  the  main  action,  or  more  wildly  improbable  than 
the  hazardous  stratagem  of  old  Martin  upon  which  that  action 
turns  ?  —  yet  it  is  so  contrived  as  to  fulfil  the  author's  avowed 
intention  of  exhibiting  under  various  forms  the  evil  and  the  folly 
of  selfishness.  This  vice  is  capable  of  both  serious  and  comic 
treatment,  and  commended  itself  in  each  aspect  to  Dickens  as 
being  essentially  antagonistic  to  his  moral  and  artistic  ideals  of 
human  life.  A  true  comedy  of  humours  thus  unfolded  itself  with 
the  progress  of  his  book,  and  one  for  which  the  types  had  not 


DICKENS. 


39 


been  fetched  from  afar:  ''Your  homes  the  scene;  yourselves  the 
actors  here,"  had  been  the  motto  which  he  had  at  first  intended 
to  put  upon  his  title-page.  Thus,  while  in  "the  old-established 
firm  of  Anthony  Chuzzlewit  and  Son  "  selfishness  is  cultivated  as  a 
growth  excellent  in  itself,  and  the  son\s  sentiment,  "  Do  other 
men,  for  they  would  do  you,"  is  applauded  by  his  admiring  father, 
in  young  Martin  the  vice  resembles  a  weed  strong  and  rank,  yet 
not  so  strong  but  that  it  gives  way  at  last  before  a  manly  en- 
deavour to  uproot  it.  The  character  of  the  hero,  though  very 
far  from  heroic,  is  worked  out  with  that  reliance  upon  the  fel- 
low-feeling of  candid  readers  which  in  our  great  novelists  of  the 
eighteenth  century  has  obtained  sympathy  for  much  less  enga- 
ging personages.  More  especially  is  the  young  man's  loss  of  self- 
respect  in  the  season  of  his  solitary  wretchedness  depicted  with 
admirable  feeling.  It  would  not,  I  think,  be  fanciful  to  assert 
that  in  this  story  Dickens  has  with  equal  skill  distinguished  be- 
tween two  species  of  unselfishness.  Mark  Tapley's  is  the  ac- 
tively unselfish  nature,  and  though  his  reiteration  of  his  guiding 
motive  is  wearisome  and  occasionally  absurd,  yet  the  power  of 
coming  out  jolly  under  unpropitious  circumstances  is  a  genuinely 
English  ideal  of  manly  virtue.  Tom  Pinch's  character,  on  the 
other  hand,  is  unselfish  from  innate  sweetness ;  and  never  has 
the  art  of  Dickens  drawn  a  type  which,  while  closely  approach- 
ing the  border-line  of  the  grotesque,  is  yet  so  charmingly  true 
to  nature. 

Grotesque  characters  proper  are  numerous  enough  in  this  book, 
but  all  the  others  pale  before  the  immortal  presence  of  Mrs.  Gamp. 
She  had  been  traced  to  an  original  in  real  life,  but  her  literary 
right  to  stand  on  her  own  legs  has  been  most  properly  vindi- 
cated against  any  supposition  of  likeness  to  the  different  type, 
the  subject  of  Leigh  Hunt's  Monthly  Nui'se  —  a  paper,  by-the- 
way,  distinguished  by  shrewdness  as  well  as  feeling.  Imagina- 
tion has  never  taken  bolder  flights  than  those  requisite  for  the 
development  of  Mrs.  Gamp's  mental  processes:  — 

"  '  And  which  of  all  them  smoking  monsters  is  the  Ankworks  boat.  I  wonder  "i 
Goodness  me ! '  cried  Mrs.  Gamp. 

" '  What  boat  did  you  want  ? '  asked  Ruth. 

"  •  The  Ankworks  package,'  Mrs.  Gamp  replied.  '  I  will  not  deceive  3'ou,  my 
sweet.    Why  should  I  ? ' 

"  •  That  is  the  Antwerp  packet  in  the  middle,'  said  Ruth. 

"  '  And  I  wish  it  was  in  Jonadge's  belly,  1  do  ! '  cried  Mrs.  Gamp,  appearing 
to  confound  the  prophet  with  the  whale  in  this  miraculous  aspiration.-' 

A  hardly  inferior  exertion  of  creative  power  was  needed  in  order 
to  fix  in  distinct  forms  the  peculiarities  of  her  diction,  nay,  to  sus- 
tain the  unique  rhythm  of  her  speech  :  — 

"  ^  I  says  to  Mrs.  Harris,'  Mrs.  Gamp  continued,  '  only  t'  other  day,  the  last 
Monday  fortnight  as  ever  dawned  upon  this  Piljian's  Projiss  of  a  mortal  wale  ; 
I  says  to  Mrs.  Harris,  when  she  says  to  me,  "  Years  and  our  trials,  ]Mrs.  Gamp, 
sets  marks  upon  us  all "  —  "  Say  not  the  words,  Mrs,  Harris,  if  you  and  me  is 
to  be  continual  friends,  for  sech  is  not  the  case.  "  '  " 


40 


DICKENS, 


Yet  the  reality  of  Mrs.  Gamp  has  been  acknowledged  to  be  such 
that  she  has  been  the  death  of  her  sisterhood  in  a  great  part  (to 
say  the  least)  of  our  hospital  wards  and  sick-rooms  ;  and  as  for  her 
oddities  of  tongue,  they  are,  with  the  exception  of  her  boldest  fig- 
ures, but  the  glorified  type  of  all  the  utterances  heard  to  this  day 
from  charwomen,  laundresses,  and  single  gentlemen's  house-keep- 
ers. Compared  with  her,  even  her  friend  and  patron,  Mr.  Mould, 
and  her  admirer,  Mr.  Bailey,  and  in  other  parts  of  the  book  the  low 
company  at  Todgers's  and  the  fine  company  at  Mr.  Tigg  Montague's 
sink  into  insignificance.  The  aged  Chuffey  is  a  grotesque  study  of 
a  very  different  kind,  of  which  the  pathos  never  loses  itself  in  exag- 
geration. As  for  Pecksniff,  he  is  as  far  out  of  the  range  of  gro- 
tesque as,  except  when  moralising  over  the  banisters  at  Todgers's, 
he  is  out  of  that  of  genial  characters.  He  is  the  richest  comic  type, 
while  at  the  same  time  one  of  the  truest,  among  the  innumerable 
reproductions  in  English  imaginative  literature  of  our  favourite 
national  vice  —  hypocrisy.  His  friendliness  is  the  very  quintes- 
sence of  falsehood:  Mr.  Pinch,"  he  cries  to  poor  Tom  over  the 
currant-wine  and  captain's  biscuits,  '^if  you  spare  the  bottle,  we 
shall  quarrel !  "  His  understanding  with  his  daughters  is  the  very 
perfection  of  guile,  for  they  confide  in  him,  even  when  ignorant  of 
his  intentions,  because  of  their  certainty  **that  in  all  he  does  he 
has  his  purpose  straight  and  full  before  him."  And  he  is  a  man 
who  understands  the  times  as  well  as  the  land  in  which  he  lives ; 
for,  as  M.  Taine  has  admirably  pointed  out,  where  TartufTe  would 
have  been  full  of  religious  phrases,  Pecksniff  presents  himself  as  a 
humanitarian  philosopher.  Comic  art  has  never  more  successfully 
fulfilled  its  highest  task  after  its  truest  fashion  than  in  this  picture 
of  the  rise  and  fall  of  a  creature  who  never  ceases  to  be  laughable, 
and  yet  never  ceases  to  be  loathsome.  Nothmg  is  wanting  in  this 
wonderful  book  to  attest  the  exuberance  of  its  author's  genius. 
The  kindly  poetic  spirit  of  the  Christmas  books  breathes  in  sweet 
Ruth  Pinch  ;  and  the  tragic  power  of  the  closing  chapters  of  Oliver 
Twist  is  recalled  by  the  picture  of  Jonas  before  and  after  his  deed 
of  blood.  I  say  nothing  of  merely  descriptive  passages,  though  in 
none  of  his  previous  stories  had  Dickens  so  completely  mastered 
the  secret  of  describing  scenery  and  weather  in  their  relation  to  his 
action  or  his  characters. 

Martin  Chuzsle^vit  ran  its  course  of  twenty  monthly  numbers ; 
but  already  a  week  or  two  before  the  appearance  of  the  first  of  these, 
Dickens  had  bestowed  upon  the  public,  young  and  old,  the  earliest 
of  his  delightful  Christinas  Books.  Among  all  his  productions  per- 
haps none  connected  him  so  closely,  and  as  it  were  personally, 
with  his  readers.  Nor  could  it  well  have  been  otherwise ;  since 
nowhere  was  he  so  directly  intent  upon  promoting  kindliness  of 
feeling  among  men  —  more  especially  good-will,  founded  upon  re- 
spect, towards  the  poor.  Cheerfulness  was,  from  his  point  of  view, 
twin-sister  to  charity ;  and  sulkiness,  like  selfishness,  belonged,  as 
an  appropriate  ort,  to  the  dust-heap  of  "  Tom  Tiddler's  Ground." 
What  more  fit  than  that  he  should  mingle  such  sentiments  as  these 


DICKENS. 


41 


with  the  holly  and  the  mistletoe  of  the  only  English  holiday  in 
which  remains  a  vestige  of  religious  and  poetic  feeling?  lieyond 
all  doubt  there  is  much  that  is  tedious  in  the  ailtus  of  Father  Christ- 
mas, and  there  was  yet  more  in  the  days  when  the  lower  classes 
in  England  had  not  yet  come  to  look  upon  a  sufficiency  of  periodi- 
cal holidays  as  part  of  their  democratic  inheritance.  But  that 
Dickens  should  constitute  himself  its  chief  minister  and  interpreter 
was  nothing  but  fit.  Already  one  of  the  Sketches  had  commended 
a  Christmas-dinner  at  which  a  seat  is  not  denied  even  to  *'poor 
Aunt  Margaret ;  "  and  Mr.  Pickwick  had  never  been  more  himself 
than  in  the  Christmas  game  of  Blind-man's-buff  at  Dingley  Dell,  in 
which  **the  poor  relations  caught  the  people  who  they  thought 
would  like  it,"  and,  when  the  game  flagged,  got  caught  them- 
selves." But  he  now  sought  to  reach  the  heart  of  the  subject ;  and 
the  freshness  of  his  fancy  enabled  him  delightfully  to  vary  his  illus- 
trations of  a  text  of  which  it  can  do  no  man  harm  to  be  remmded 
in  as  well  as  out  of  season. 

Dickens's  Christmas  books  were  published  in  the  Christmas  sea- 
sons of  1843-1846,  and  of  1848.  If  the  palm  is  to  be  granted  to 
any  one  among  them  above  its  fellows,  few  readers  would  hesitate, 
I  think,  to  declare  themselves  in  favour  of  The  Cricket  on  the 
Hearth,  as  tender  and  delicate  a  domestic  idyl  as  any  literature 
can  boast.  But  the  informing  spirit  proper  of  these  productions, 
the  desire  to  stir  up  a  feeling  of  benevolence,  more  especially  to- 
wards the  poor  and  lowly,  nowhere  shows  itself  more  conspicuously 
than  in  the  earliest,  A  Chi'istmas  Carol  in  Prose;  and  nowhere 
more  combatively  than  in  the  second  in  date,  the  Goblin  Story  " 
of  The  Chimes,  Of  the  former,  its  author  declared  that  he  wept 
and  laughed  and  wept  again"  over  it,  *'and  excited  himself  in 
a  most  extraordinary  manner  in  the  composition ;  and  thinking 
thereof,  he  walked  about  the  black  streets  of  London,  fifteen  and 
twenty  miles  many  a  night,  when  all  the  sober  folks  had  gone  to 
bed."  Simple  in  its  romantic  design,  like  one  of  Andersen's  little 
tales,  the  Christmas  Carol  has  never  lost  its  hold  upon  a  public 
in  whom  it  has  called  forth  Christmas  thoughts  which  do  not  all 
centre  on  holly,  mistletoe,  red  berries,  ivy,  turkeys,  geese,  game, 
poultry,  brawn,  meat,  pigs,  sausages,  oysters,  pies,  puddings,  fruit, 
and  punch ; "  and  the  Cratchit  household,  with  Tiny  Tim,  who  did 
NOT  die,  are  living  realities  even  to  those  who  have  not  seen  Mr. 
Toole  —  an  actor  after  Dickens's  own  heart  —  as  the  father  of  the 
family,  shivering  in  his  half-yard  of  comforter. 

In  The  Chi?nes,  composed  in  self-absorbed  solitude  at  Genoa,  he 
imagined  that  *'  he  had  written  a  tremendous  book,  and  knocked 
the  Carol  out  of  the  field."  Though  the  little  work  failed  to  make 
**  the  great  uproar"  he  had  confidently  anticipated,  its  purpose  was 
certainly  unmistakable ;  but  the  effect  of  hard  exaggerations  such 
as  Mr.  Filer  and  Alderman  Cute,  and  of  a  burlesque  absurdity  like 
Sir  Joseph  Bowley,  was  too  dreary  to  be  counteracted  by  the  more 
pleasing  passages  of  the  tale.  In  his  novel  Hard  Tiines^  Dickens 
afterwards  reproduced  some  of  the  ideas,  and  repeated  some  of  the 


42 


DICKENS. 


artistic  mistakes,  to  be  found  in  The  Chi?nes,  though  the  de^sign  of 
the  later  work  was  necessarily  of  a  more  mixed  kind.  The  Christ- 
mas book  has  the  tone  of  a  docti'inaire  protest  against  doctri- 
7iai?'es,  and,  as  Forster  has  pointed  out,  is  manifestly  written  under 
the  influence  of  Carlyle.  But  its  main  doctrine  was  one  which 
Dickens  lost  no  opportunity  of  proclaiming,  and  which  here  breaks 
forth  in  the  form  of  an  indignant  appeal  by  Richard  Fern,  the  out- 
law, in  spite  of  himself:  Gentlefolks,  be  not  hard  upon  the  poor!" 
No  feeling  was  more  deeply  rooted  in  Dickens's  heart  than  this ; 
nor  could  he  forbear  expressing  it  by  invective  and  satire  as  well  as 
by  humorous  and  pathetic  pictures  of  his  clients,  among  whom 
Trotty  Veck  too  takes  a  representative  place. 

The  Cricket  07i  the  Hearth^  as  a  true  work  of  art,  is  not  troubled 
about  its  moral,  easily  though  half-a-dozen  plain  morals  might  be 
drawn  from  it ;  a  purer  and  more  lightsome  creation  of  the  fancy 
has  never  been  woven  out  of  homespun  materials.  Of  the  same 
imaginative  type,  though  not  executed  with  a  fineness  so  surpass- 
ing, is  The  Battle  of  Life,  the  treatment  of  a  fancy  in  which  Dick- 
ens appears  to  have  taken  great  pleasure.  Indeed,  he  declared 
that  he  was  *'  thoroughly  wretched  at  having  to  use  the  idea  for  so 
short  a  story."  As  it  stands,  it  is  a  pretty  idyl  of  resignation,  very 
poetical  in  tone  as  well  as  in  conception,  though  here  and  there, 
notwithstanding  the  complaint  just  quoted,  rather  lengthy.  It  has 
been  conjectured,  with  much  probability,  that  the  success  which 
had  attended  dramatic  versions  of  Dickens's  previous  Christmas 
books  caused  *' those  admirable  comedians,  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Keeley," 
to  be  in  his  mind  "when  he  drew  the  charming  characters  of 
Britain  and  Clemency  Newcome."  At  all  events,  the  pair  serve  as 
good  old  bits  of  English  pottery  to  relieve  the  delicate  Sevres  sen- 
timent of  Grace  and  Marion.  In  the  last  of  Dickens's  Christmas 
books,  The  Haunted  Man  and  the  Ghost ''s  Baroain,  he  returns 
once  more  to  a  machinery  resembling  those  of  the  earliest.  But 
the  fancy  on  which  the  action  turns  is  here  more  forced,  and  the 
truth  which  it  illustrates  is  after  all  only  a  half-truth,  unless  taken 
as  part  of  the  greater  truth,  that  the  moral  conditions  of  man's  life 
are  more  easily  marred  than  niended.  Once  more  the  strength  of 
the  book  lies  in  its  humorous  side.  The  picture  of  the  good 
Milly's  humble  'proteges,  the  Tetterby  family,  is  to  remind  us  that 
happiness  consists  precisely  in  that  which  the  poor  and  the  rich 
may  alike  obtain,  but  which  it  is  so  difficult  for  the  poor,  amidst 
their  shifts  and  shabbiness,  to  keep  fresh  and  green.  Even  without 
the  evil  influence  of  an  enchanted  chemist,  it  is  hard  enough  for 
the  Mrs.  Tetterbys  of  real  life  always  to  be  ministering  angels  to 
their  families  ;  for  the  hand  of  every  little  Tetterby  not  occasionally 
to  be  against  the  other  little  Tetterbys,  and  even  for  a  devoted 
Johnny's  temper  never  to  rise  against  Moloch.  All  the  more  is 
that  to  be  cherished  in  the  poor  which  makes  them  love  one 
another. 

More  than  one  of  these  Christmas  books,  both  the  humour  and 
the  sentiment  of  which  are  so  peculiarly  English,  was  written  on 


VICKENS. 


43 


foreign  soil.  Dickens's  general  conceptions  of  life,  not  less  than 
his  literary  individuality,  had  been  formed  before  he  became  a  trav- 
eller and  sojourner  in  foreign  lands.  In  Italy,  as  elsewhere,  a  man 
will,  in  a  sense,  find  only  what  he  takes  there.  At  all  events  the 
changed  life  brought  with  it  for  Dickens,  though  not  at  once,  a 
refreshment  and  a  brief  repose  which  invigorated  him  for  some  of 
the  truest  efforts  of  his  genius.  His  resolution  to  spend  some  time 
on  the  Continent  had  not  been  taken  rashly,  although  it  was  at 
least  hastened  by  business  disappointments.  He  seems  at  this 
time,  as  was  virtually  inevitable,  to  have  seen  a  good  deal  of  society 
in  London,  and  more  especially  to  have  become  a  welcome  guest  of 
Lady  Blessington  and  Count  d'Orsay  at  Gore  House.  Moreover, 
his  services  were  beginning  to  be  occasionally  claimed  as  a  put)lic 
speaker;  and  altogether  he  must  have  found  more  of  his  time  than 
he  wished  slipping  through  his  hands.  Lastly,  he  very  naturally 
desired  to  see  what  was  to  be  seen,  and  to  enjoy  what  was  to  be 
enjoyed,  by  one  gifted  with  a  sleepless  observation  and  animated 
by  a  genuine  love  of  nature  and  art.  The  letters,  public  and  pri- 
vate, which  he  wrote  from  Italy,  are  not  among  the  most  interest- 
ing productions  of  his  pen  ;  even  his  humour  seems  now  and  then 
ill  at  ease  in  them,  and  his  descriptive  power  narrow  in  its  range. 
His  eyes  were  occasionally  veiled,  as  are  those  of  most  travellers 
in  quest  of  first  impressions."  Thus  I  cannot  but  think  his  pic- 
ture of  Naples  inadaquate,  and  that  of  its  population  unjust. 
Again,  although  he  may  have  told  the  truth  in  asserting  that  the 
Eternal  City,  at  first  sight,  looked  like  —  I  am  half  afraid  to  write 
the  word  —  like  London,"  and  although  his  general  description  of 
Rome  has  been  pronounced  correct  by  competent  judgment,  yet  it 
is  impossible  to  ignore  in  it  the  undertone  of  Bow  Bells.  On  the 
other  hand,  not  even  in  his  newspaper  letters  can  he  be  said  to  fall 
into  affectation ;  his  impressions  are  never  given  pretentiously,  and 
are  accordingly  seldom  altogether  worthless  ;  while  his  criticisms  of 
works  of  art,  when  offered,  are  candid  and  shrevv'd,  besides  being 
invariably  his  own. 

Thus,  there  was  never  anything  truer  in  its  way  than  the  account 
which  he  gave  to  Maclise  of  his  first  impressions  a  fev/  days  after 
his  arrival  at  Albaro,  a  suburb  of  Genoa,  where  he  found  him.seif 
settled  with  his  family  in  July,  1844.  He  re-christened  his  abode, 
the  Villa  Bagnerello  it  sounds  romantic,  but  Signer  Banderello 
is  a  butcher  hard  by"),  '*the  Pink  Jail."  Here,  with  abundance 
of  space  and  time,  and  with  a  view  from  his  writing-table  of  "the 
sea,  the  mountains,  the  washed-out  villas,  the  vineyards,  the  blis- 
tering hot  fort,  with  a  sentry  on  the  drawbridge  standing  in  a  bit 
of  shadow  no  broader  than  his  own  musket,  and  the  sky,"  he  began 
his  villeggiatiira,  and  resolving  not  to  know,  or  to  be  known  where 
it  could  be  helped,  looked  round  him  at  his  leisure.  This  looking 
round  very  naturally  took  up  some  time  ;  for  the  circuit  of  Dickens's 
daily  observation  was  unusually  wide.  Soon  he  was  seeking  win- 
ter-quarters in  Genoa  itself,  and  by  October  w^as  established  in  the 
Palazzo  Peschiere,  situate  on  a  height  within  the  walls  of  the  city, 


44 


DICKENS. 


and  overlooking  the  whole  of  it,  with  the  harbour  and  the  sea 
beyond.  There  is  not  in  Italy,  they  say,  (and  I  believe  them), 
a  lovelier  residence."  Even  here,  however,  among  fountains  and 
frescoes,  it  was  some  time  before  he  could  set  steadily  to  work  at 
his  Christmas  story.  At  last  the  bells  of  Genoa  chimed  a  title  for 
it  into  his  restless  ears;  and,  though  longing  with  a  nostalgy  that 
was  specially  strong  upon  him  at  periods  of  mental  excitement  for 
his  nightly  walks  in  the  London  streets,  he  settled  down  to  his 
task.  I  have  already  described  the  spirit  in  which  he  executed  it. 
No  sooner  was  the  writing  done  than  the  other  half  of  his  double 
artist-nature  was  seized  with  another  craving.  The  rage  which  pos- 
sesses authors  to  read  their  writings  aloud  to  sympathizing  ears,  if 
such  can  be  found,  is  a  well-worn  theme  of  satire ;  but  in  Dickens 
the  actor  was  almost  as  strong  as  the  author,  and  he  could  not 
withstand  the  desire  to  interpret  in  person  what  he  had  written, 
and  to  watch  its  effect  with  his  own  eyes  and  ears.  In  the  first 
days  of  November,  therefore,  he  set  off  from  Genoa,  and  made  his 
way  home  by  Bologna,  Venice,  Milan,  and  the  Simplon  Pass.  Of 
this  journey  his  Pictures  fro?n  Italy  contains  the  record,  including 
a  chapter  about  Venice,  pitched  in  an  unusually  poetic  key.  But 
not  all  the  memories  of  all  the  Doges  could  have  stayed  the  execu- 
tion of  his  set  purpose.  On  the  30th  of  November  he  reached 
London,  and  on  the  2d  of  December  he  was  reading  the  Chi7nes, 
from  the  proofs,  to  the  group  of  friends  immortalised  in  Maclise's 
inimitable  sketch.  Three  days  afterwards  the  reading  was  repeated 
to  a  slightly  different  audience ;  and,  indeed,  it  would  seem,  from 
an  enthusiastic  postscript  to  a  letter  addressed  to  his  wife,  that  he 
had  read  at  least  part  of  the  book  to  Macready  on  the  night  before 
that  of  the  first  conclave.  The  distance  was  no  doubt  wide  between 
the  intimacy  of  these  friendly  readings  and  the  stormy  seas  of  pub- 
lic audiences ;  but,  however  unconsciously,  the  first  step  had  been 
taken.  It  may  be  worth  noticing,  in  connexion  with  this,  that  the 
scheme  of  a  private  dramatic  performance,  which  was  to  occupy 
much  of  Dickens\s  leisure"  in  the  year  following,  was  proposed 
for  the  first  time  on  the  occasion  of  the  first  reading  of  the  Chwtes, 
Before  Christmas  he  was  back  again  in  his  Italian  bowers."  If 
the  strain  of  his  effort  in  writing  the  Chimes  had  been  severe,  the 
holiday  which  followed  was  long.  In  the  later  winter  and  early 
spring  of  1845  he  and  the  ladies  of  his  family  saw  Rome  and  Naples, 
and  in  June  their  Italian  life  came  to  an  end,  and  they  were  in 
London  before  the  close  of  the  month.  Projects  of  work  remained 
in  abeyance  until  the  absorbing  fancy  of  a  private  play  had  been 
realised  with  an  earnestness  such  as  only  Dickens  could  carry  into 
his  amusements,  and  into  this  particular  amusement  above  all 
others.  The  play  was  Every  Man  in  his  Humour ;  the  theatre, 
the  little  house  in  Dean  Street,  of  whose  chequered  fortunes  no 
theatrical  history  has  succeeded  in  exhausting  the  memories ;  and 
the  manager  was,  of  course,  Bobadil,"  as  Dickens  now  took  to 
signing  himself.  His  joking  remark  to  Macready,  that  he  thought 
of  changing  his  present  mode  of  life,  and  was  open  to  an  engage- 


DICKENS. 


45 


ment,"  was  after  all  not  so  very  wide  of  the  mark.  According  to 
the  inevitable  rule  in  such  things,  he  and  his  friends  —  among 
whom  Mark  Lemon,  Douglas  Jerrold,  and  Forster  were  conspicuous 

—  were  induced^'  to  repeat  their  performance  at  a  larger  house 
for  a  public  charity,  and  later  in  the  year  they  played  The  Elder 
Brother  for  Miss  Fanny  Kelly's  benefit.  Leigh  Hunt,  whose 
opinion,  however,  could  hardly  fail  to  be  influenced  by  the  circum- 
stances under  which  Ben  Jonson's  comedy  was  afterwards  per- 
formed by  the  amateurs,  and  who  was  no  longer  the  youthful  Uraco 
of  the  News,  afterwards  spoke  very  highly  of  Dickens's  Bobadil.  It 
had  a  spirit  in  it  of  intellectual  apprehension  beyond  anything 
the  existing  stage  has  shown."  His  acting,  in  the  farce  which  fol- 
lowed, Leigh  Hunt  thought  **  throughout  admirable  ;  quite  rich  and 
filled  up." 

Christmas,  1845,  had  passed,  and  The  Cricket  on  the  Hearth 
had  graced  the  festival,  when  an  altogether  new  chapter  in  Dickens's 
life  seemed  about  to  open  for  him.  The  experience  through  which 
he  now  passed  was  one  on  which  his  biographer,  for  reasons  easy 
to  guess,  has  touched  very  slightly,  while  his  Letters  throw  no  ad- 
ditional light  on  it  at  all.  Most  people,  I  imagine,  would  decline 
to  pronounce  upon  the  qualifications  requisite  in  an  editor  of  a 
great  political  journal.  Yet,  literary  power  of  a  kind  which  acts 
upon  the  multitude  rapidly  and  powerfully,  habits  of  order  so  con- 
firmed as  to  have  almost  become  second  nature,  and  an  interest  in 
the  affairs  of  the  nation  fed  by  an  ardent  enthusiasm  for  its  welfare, 

—  these  would  seem  to  go  some  way  towards  making  up  the  list. 
Of  all  these  qualifications  Dickens  at  various  times  gave  proof,  and 
they  sufficed  in  later  years  to  make  him  the  successful  conductor  of 
a  weekly  journal  which  aimed  at  the  enlightenment  hardly  less  than 
at  the  entertainment  of  no  inconsiderable  portion  of  the  British 
public.  But,  in  the  first  place,  political  journalism  proper  is  a  craft 
of  which  very  few  men  have  been  known  to  become  masters  by 
intuition,  and  Dickens  had  as  yet  had  no  real  experience  of  it.  His 
zealous  efforts  as  a  reporter  can  hardly  be  taken  into  account  here. 
He  had  for  a  short  time  edited  a  miscellany  of  amusement,  and  had 
failed  to  carry  beyond  a  beginning  the  not  very  carefully  considered 
scheme  of  another.  Recently,  he  had  resumed  the  old  notion  of 
Master  Humphrey's  Clock  in  a  different  shape ;  but  nothing  had 
come  of  his  projected  cheap  weekly  paper  for  the  present,  while  its 
title,  '''•The  Crickety"^  was  reserved  for  a  different  use.  Since  his 
reporting  days  he  had,  however,  now  and  then  appeared  among  the 
lighter  combatants  of  political  literature.  In  1841  he  had  thrown  a 
few  squibs  in  the  Exa7niner  at  Sir  Robert  Peel  and  the  Tories  ;  and 
from  about  the  same  date  he  had,  besides  occasionally  contributing 
to  the  literary  and  theatrical  columns  of  the  same  weekly  journal,  now 
and  then  discussed  in  it  subjects  of  educational  or  other  general 
interest.!    Finally,  it  is  stated  by  Forster  that  in  1844,  when  the 

1  From  a  list  of  MSS.  at  South  Kensington,  kindly  furnished  me  by  Mr.  R.  F. 
Sketchley,  I  find  that  Mr.  R.  H.  Shepherd's  Bibliography  of  Dickens  is  incompjete  on 
this  head. 


46 


DICKENS, 


greatest  political  struggle  of  the  last  generation  was  approacliing  its 
climax,  Dickens  contributed  some  articles  to  the  Morjii7ig  Chro7iicle 
which  attracted  attention  and  led  to  negotiations  with  the  editor 
that  arrived  at  no  positive  result.  If  these  contributions  treated 
any  political  questions  whatever,  they  were,  with  the  exception  of 
the  few  Examiner  papers,  and  of  the  letters  to  the  Daily  A-ews  to 
be  mentioned  in  this  chapter,  the  only  articles  of  this  kind  which, 
to  my  knowledge,  he  ever  wrote. 

For,  from  first  to  last,  v;hether  in  the  days  when  Oliver  Twist 
suffered  under  the  maladministration  of  the  Poor-law,  or  in  those 
when  Arthur  Clennam  failed  to  make  an  impression  upon  the  Cir- 
cumlocution Office,  politics  were  with  Dickens  a  sentiment  rather 
than  a  study  or  a  pursuit.  With  his  habits  of  application  and 
method,  it  might  have  taken  but  a  very  short  time  for  him  to  train 
himself  as  a  politician ;  but  this  short  time  never  actually  oc- 
curred. There  is,  however,  no  reason  to  suppose  that  when,  in 
1 841,  a  feeler  was  put  out  by  some  more  or  less  influential  persons 
at  Reading,  with  regard  to  his  willingness  to  be  nominated  for  the 
representation  of  that  borough,  he  had  any  reason  for  declining 
the  proposal  besides  that  which  he  stated  in  his  replies.  He  could 
not  afford  the  requisite  expense ;  and  he  was  determined  not  to 
forfeit  his  independence  through  accepting  Government  —  by  which 
I  hope  he  means  Whig  party  —  aid  for  meeting  the  cost  of  the  con- 
test. Still,  in  1845,  though  slack  of  faith  in  the  people  who 
govern  us,"  he  had  not  yet  become  the  irreclaimable  political  sceptic 
of  later  days ;  and  without  being  in  any  way  bound  to  the  Whigs, 
he  had  that  general  confidence  in  Lord  John  Russell  which  was  all 
they  could  expect  from  their  irregular  followers.  As  yet,  however, 
he  had  shown  no  sign  of  any  special  aptitude  or  inclination  for 
political  work,  though  if  he  addressed  himself  to  questions  affecting 
the  health  and  happiness  of  the  humbler  classes,  he  was  certain 
to  bring  to  them  the  enthusiasm  of  a  genuine  sympathy.  And  a 
question  of  this  kind  was  uppermost  in  Englishmen's  minds  in  this 
year  1845,  when  at  last  the  time  was  drawing  near  for  the  complete 
abolition  of  the  tax  upon  the  staple  article  of  the  poor  man's  daily 
food. 

The  establishment  of  a  new  London  morning  paper,  on  the  scale 
to  which  those  already  in  existence  had  attained,  was  a  serious 
matter  in  itself ;  but  it  seems  to  have  been  undertaken  in  no  spirit 
of  diffidence  by  the  projectors  and  first  proprietors  of  the  Daily 
News,  With  the  early  history  of  the  experiment  I  cannot  here 
concern  myself ;  it  is,  however,  an  open  secret  that  the  rate  of  ex- 
penditure of  the  new  journal  was  at  first  on  a  most  liberal,  not 
to  say  lavish  scale,  and  that  the  losses  of  the  proprietors  were  for 
many  years  very  large  indeed.  Established  on  those  principles  of 
Radicalism  which,  on  the  whole,  it  has  in  both  good  and  evil  times 
consistently  maintained,  the  Daily  News  was  to  rise  superior  to  the 
opportunism,  if  not  to  the  advertisements,  of  the  Tiines^  and  to  out- 
strip the  cautious  steps  of  the  Whig  Morning  Chronicle.  Special 
attention  was  to  be  given  to  those  industrial  enterprises  with  which 


DICKENS. 


47 


the  world  teemed  in  that  speculative  age,  and  no  doubt  also  to 
those  social  questions  affecting  the  welfare  and  elevation  of  the 
masses,  and  the  relations  between  employers  and  employed,  which 
were  attracting  more  and  more  of  the  public  attention.  But  in  the 
first  instance  the  actual  political  situation  would  oblige  the  new 
journal  to  direct  the  greater  part  of  its  energies  to  one  particular 
question,  which  had,  in  truth,  already  been  threshed  out  by  the 
organs  of  public  opinion,  and  as  to  which  the  time  for  action  had  at 
last  arrived.  No  Liberal  journal  projected  in  1845,  started  early 
in  1846,  could  fail  to  concentrate  its  activity  for  a  time  upon  the 
question  of  the  Corn-laws,  tQ  which  the  session  of  1846  was  to  give 
the  death-blow. 

It  is  curious  enough,  on  opening  the  first  number  of  the  Daily 
News,  dated  January  21,  1846,  to  find  one's  self  transplanted  into 
the  midst  of  one  of  the  most  memorable  episodes  of  our  more  re- 
cent political  history.  The  very  advertisements  of  subscriptions  to 
the  Anti-Corn-law  League,  with  the  good  old  Manchester  names 
figuring  conspicuously  among  them,  have  a  historic  interest;  and 
the  report  of  a  disputation  on  free-tra.de  at  Norwich,  in  which  all 
the  hits  are  made  by  Mr.  Cobden,  another  report  of  a  great  London 
meeting  on  the  same  subject,  and  some  verses  concerning  the 
people's  want  of  its  bread,  probably  written  by  Mr.  Charles  Mac- 
kay,  occupy  an  entire  page  of  the  paper.  Railway  news  and  ac- 
counts of  railway  meetings  fill  about  the  same  space ;  while  the 
foreign  news  is  extremely  meagre.  There  remain  the  leading  arti- 
cles, four  in  number  —  of  which  three  are  on  the  burning  question 
of  the  day — and  the  first  of  a  series  of  Travelling  Letters  Written 
on  the  Road,  by  Charles  Dickens  (the  Avignon  claapter  in  the  Pic- 
tures from  Italy.')  ^  The  hand  of  the  editor  is  traceable  only  in  this 
feuilleton  and  in  the  opening  article  of  the  new  paper.  On  internal 
evidence  I  conclude  that  this  article,  which  has  little  to  distinguish 
it  from  similar  manifestoes,  unless  it  be  a  moderation  of  tone  that 
would  not  have  suited  Captain  Shandon,  was  not  written  by  Dickens 
alone  or  unassisted.  But  his  hand  is  traceable  in  the  concluding 
paragraphs,  which  contain  the  following  wordy  but  spirited  assertion 
of  a  cause  that  Dickens  lost  no  opportunity  of  advocating :  — 

"  We  seek,  so  far  as  in  us  lies,  to  elevate  the  character  of  the  Public  Press  in 
England.  We  believe  it  would  attain  a  much  higher  position,  and  that  those 
who  wield  its  powers  would  be  infinitely  more  respected  as  a  class,  and  an  im- 
portant one,  if  it  were  purged  of  a  disposition  to  sordid  attacks  upon  itself^  which 
only  prevails  in  England  and  America.  We  discern  nothing  in  the  editorial 
plural  that  justifies  a  gentleman,  or  body  of  gentlemen,  in  discarding  a  gentle- 
man's forbearance  and  responsibility,  and  venting  ungenerous  spleen  against 
a  rival,  by  a  perversion  of  a  great  power  —  a  power,  however,  which  is  only  great 

1  By  an  odd  coincidence,  not  less  than  four  out  of  the  six  theatres  advertising  their 
jjerformances  in  this  first  number  of  the  Daily  News  announce  each  a  different  adapta- 
tion of  The  Cricket  oit  the  Hearth,  Amongst  the  curiosities  of  the  casts  are  observable  : 
At  the  Adelphi,  Wris^ht  as  Tilly  Slowboy,  and  at  the  Haymarket,  Buckstone  in  the  same 
character,  with  William  Farren  as  Caleb  Plummcr.  The  latter  part  is  taken  at  the 
Princess's  by  Compton,  Mrs.  Stirling  playing  Dot.  At  the  Lyceum,  Mr.,  Mrs.,  and  Miss 
Mary  Keeley,  and  j\Ir.  Emery,  appear  in  the  piece. 


48 


DICKENS, 


so  long  as  it  is  good  and  honest.  The  stamp  on  newspapers  is  not  like  the 
stamp  on  universal  medicine-bottles,  which  licenses  anything,  however,  false  and 
monstrous ;  and  we  are  sure  this  misuse  of  it,  in  any  notorious  case,  not  only 
offends  and  repels  right-minded  men  in  that  particular  instance,  but  naturally, 
though  unjustly,  involves  the  whole  Press,  as  a  pursuit  or  profession,  in  the  feel- 
ing so  awakened,  and  places  the  character  of  all  who  are  associated  with  it  at  a 
great  disadvantage. 

"  Entering  on  this  adventure  of  a  new  daily  journal  in  a  spirit  of  honourable 
competition  and  hope  of  pubHc  usefulness,  we  seek,  in  our  new  station,  at  once  to 
preserve  our  own  self-respect,  and  to  be  respected,  for  ourselves  and  for  it,  by  our 
readers.  Therefore,  we  beg  them  to  receive,  in  this  our  first  number,  the  assur- 
ance that  no  recognition  or  interchange  of  trade  abuse,  by  us,  shall  be  the  de- 
struction of  either  sentiment ;  and  that  we  intend  proceeding  on  our  way,  and 
theirs,  without  stooping  to  any  such  flowers  by  the  roadside." 

I  am  unable  to  say  how  many  days  it  was  after  the  appear- 
ance of  this  first  number  that  Dickens,  or  the  proprietors  of  the 
journal,  or,  as  seems  most  likely,  both  sides  simultaneously,  began 
to  consider  the  expediency  of  ending  the  connexion  between  them. 
He  was  revolving  plans  for  quitting  the  paper"  on  January  30, 
and  resigned  his  editorship  on  February  9  following.  In  the  inter- 
val, with  the  exception  of  two  or  three  more  of  the  Travelling  Let- 
tej's,  very  few  signs  of  his  hand  appear  in  the  journal.  The  number 
January  24,  however,  contains  an  editorial  contribution,  in  the  shape 
of  *'a  new  song,  but  an  old  story,"  concerning  The  British  Lio?i, 
his  accomplishment  of  eating  Corn-law  Leagues,  his  principal 
keeper,  lVa7i  Huittbug,  and  so  forth.  This  it  would  be  cruel 
to  unearth.  A  more  important  indication  of  a  line  of  writing 
that  his  example  may  have  helped  to  domesticate  in  the  Daily 
News  appears  in  the  number  of  February  4,  which  contains  a 
long  letter,  with  his  signature,  urging  the  claims  of  Ragged 
Schools,  and  giving  a  graphic  account  of  his  visit  to  one  in  Saf- 
fron Hill.  After  he  had  placed  his  resignation  in  the  hands  of 
the  proprietors,  and  was  merely  holding  on  at  his  post  till  the 
time  of  his  actual  withdrawal,  he  was  naturally  not  anxious  to 
increase  the  number  of  his  contributions.  The  Hymn  of  the 
Wiltshire  Labourers  —  which  appeared  on  February  14-ris,  of 
course,  an  echo  of  the  popular  cry  of  the  day;  but  the  subtler 
pathos  of  Dickens  never  found  its  way  into  his  verse.  The  most 
important,  and  so  far  as  I  know,  the  last,  of  his  contributions 
to  the  Daily  News,  consisted  of  a  series  of  three  letters  (March 
9,  13,  and  16)  on  capital  punishment.  It  was  a  question  which 
much  occupied  him  at  various  times  of  his  life,  and  on  which  it 
cannot  be  shown  that  he  really  changed  his  opinions.  The  let- 
ters in  the  Daily  News,  based  in  part  on  the  arguments  of  one 
of  the  ablest  men  of  his  day,  the  *'  unlucky"  Mr.  Wakefield,  are 
an  interesting  contribution  to  the  subject ;  and  the  first  of  them, 
with  its  Hogarthian  sketch  of  the  temptation  and  fall  of  Thomas 
Hocker,  Sunday-school  teacher  and  murderer,  would  be  worth 
reprinting  as  an  example  of  Dickens's  masterly  use  of  the  argument 
ex  concreto. 

The  few  traditions  which  linger  in  the  Daily  News  office  con- 


DICKENS. 


49 


cerning  Dickens  as  editor  of  the  paper,  agree  with  the  conjecture 
that  his  labours  on  its  behalf  were  limited,  or  very  nearly  so,  to  the 
few  pieces  enumerated  above.  Of  course  there  must  have  been 
some  inevitable  business ;  but  of  this  much  may  have  been  taken 
off  his  hands  by  his  sub-editor,  Mr.  W.  H.  Wills,  who  afterwards 
became  his  alter  ego  at  the  office  of  his  own  weekly  journal  and  his 
intimate  personal  friend.  In  the  days  of  the  first  infancy  of  the 
Daily  News,  Mr.  Britton,  the  present  publisher  of  that  journal, 
was  attached  to  the  editor  as  his  personal  office  attendant ;  and  he 
remembers  very  vividly  what  little  there  can  have  been  to  remem- 
ber about  Dickens's  performance  of  his  functions.  His  habit,  fol- 
lowing a  famous  precedent,  was  to  make  up  for  coming  late  — 
usually  about  half-past  ten  p.m.  —  by  going  away  early  —  usually 
not  long  after  midnight.  There  were  frequently  sounds  of  merri- 
ment, if  not  of  modest  revelry,  audible  from  the  little  room  at  the 
office  in  Lombard  Street,  where  the  editor  sat  in  conclave  with 
Douglas  Jerrold  and  one  or  two  other  intimates.  Mr.  Britton  is 
not  sure  that  the  work  did  not  sometimes  begin  after  the  editor  had 
left ;  but  at  all  events  he  cannot  recollect  that  Dickens  ever  wrote 
anything  at  the  office  —  that  he  ever,  for  instance,  wrote  about  a 
debate  that  had  taken  place  in  Parliament  on  the  same  night.  And 
he  sums  up  his  reminiscences  by  declaring  his  conviction  that 
Dickens  was  *'not  a  newspaper  man,  at  least  not  when  in  *  the 
chair.' "  And  so  Dickens  seems  on  this  occasion  to  have  con- 
cluded ;  for  when,  not  long  after  quitting  the  paper,  he  republished 
with  additions  the  Travelling  Letters  which  during  his  conduct  of 
it  had  been  its  principal  ornaments,  he  spoke  of  a  brief  mistake 
he  had  made,  not  long  ago,  in  disturbing  the  old  relations  between 
himself  and  his  readers,  and  departing  for  a  moment  from  his  old 
pursuits."  He  had  been  virtually  out  of  **the  chair"  almost  as 
soon  as  he  had  taken  it.  His  successor,  but  only  for  a  few  months, 
was  his  friend  Forster. 

Never  has  captive  released  made  a  more  eager  or  a  better  use  of 
his  recovered  freedom.  Before  the  summer  had  fairly  set  in 
Dickens  had  let  his  house,  and  was  travelling  with  his  family 
up  the  Rhine  towards  Switzerland.  This  was,  I  think,  Dickens's 
only  passage  through  Germany,  which  in  language  and  literature 
remained  a  te7'ra  incognita  to  him,  while  in  various  ways  so  well 
known  to  his  friendly  rivals.  Lord  Lytton  and  Thackeray.  He  was 
on  the  track  of  poor  Thomas  Hood's  old  journeyings,  whose  face- 
tious recollections  of  Rhineland  he  had  some  years  before  reviewed 
in  a  spirit  of  admiration  rather  for  the  author  than  for  the  book, 
funny  as  it  is.  His  point  of  destination  was  Lausanne,  where  he 
had  resolved  to  establish  his  household  for  the  summer,  and  where 
by  the  middle  of  June  they  were  most  agreeably  settled  in  a  little 
villa  or  cottage  which  did  not  belie  its  name  of  Rosemont,  and  from 
which  they  looked  upon  the  lake  and  the  mighty  Alpine  chain  be- 
yond. If  Rome  had  reminded  Dickens  of  London,  the  green  woods 
near  Lausanne  recalled  to  him  his  Kentish  glades ;  but  he  had  the 
fullest  sense  and  the  truest  enjoyment  of  the  grandeur  of  Alpine 


50 


DICKENS, 


scenery,  and  lost  no  opportunity  of  becoming  acquainted  with 
them.  Thus  his  letters  contain  an  admirable  description  (not 
untinged  with  satire)  of  a  trip  to  the  great  St.  Bernard  and  its 
convent,  many  years  afterwards  reproduced  in  one  of  the  few 
enjoyable  chapters  of  the  Second  Part  of  Liitle  Dorrit.  More 
interesting,  however,  because  more  characteristic,  is  the  freshness 
and  candour  with  which  in  Switzerland,  where  by  most  English 
visitors  the  native  inhabitants  are  "  taken  for  granted,"  he  set  him- 
self to  observe,  and,  so  far  as  he  could,  to  appreciate,  the  people 
among  whom  he  was  a  temporary  resident.  His  solutions  of  some 
of  the  political  difficulties,  which  were  mostly  connected  with  reli- 
gious differences,  at  that  time  rife  in  Switzerland,  are  palpably  one- 
sided. But  the  generosity  of  spirit  which  reveals  itself  in  his 
kindly  recognition  of  the  fine  qualities  of  the  people  around  him 
is  akin  to  what  was  best  and  noblest  in  Dickens. 

He  had,  at  the  same  time,  been  peculiarly  fortunate  in  finding  at 
Lausanne  a  circle  of  pleasant  acquaintances,  to  whom  he  dedicated 
the  Christmas  book  which  he  wrote  among  the  roses  and  the  foliage 
of  his  lake-side  cottage.  Of  course  The  Battle  of  Life  was  read  aloud 
by  its  author  to  so  kindly  an  audience.  The  day  of  parting,  how- 
ever, soon  came;  on  the  i6th  of  November  paterfa;niltas  had  his 
*'  several  tons  of  luggage,  other  tons  of  servants,  and  other  tons  of 
children,*'  in  travelling  order,  and  soon  had  safely  stowed  them 
away  at  Paris  in  the  most  preposterous  house  in  the  world.  The 
like  of  it  cannot,  and  so  far  as  my  knowledge  goes,  does  not,  exist 
in  any  other  part  of  the  globe.  The  bedrooms  are  like  opera- 
boxes  ;  the  dining-rooms,  stair-cases,  and  passages  quite  inexpli- 
cable. The  dining-room" — which  in  another  letter  he  describes 
as  "mere  midsummer  madness" — *Ms  a  sort  of  cavern,  painted 
(ceiling  and  all)  to  represent  a  grove,  with  unaccountable  bits  of 
looking-glass  sticking  in  among  the  branches  of  the  trees.  There 
is  a  gleam  of  reason  in  the  drawing-room,  but  it  is  approached 
through  a  series  of  small  chambers,  like  the  joints  in  a  telescope, 
which  are  hung  with  inscrutable  drapery."  Here,  with  the  excep- 
tion of  two  brief  visits  to  England,  paid  before  his  final  departure, 
he  spent  three  months,  familiarising  himself  for  the  first  time  of  his 
life  with  the  second  of  his     Two  Cities." 

Dickens  came  to  know  the  French  language  well  enough  to  use 
it  with  ease,  if  not  with  elegance  ;  and  he  lost  no  opportunity,  it 
need  hardly  be  said,  of  resorting  to  the  best  of  schools  for  the  pur- 
pose. Macready,  previously  addressed  from  '*  Altorf,"  had  made 
him  acquainted  with  Regnier,  of  the  Th^^tre  Fran9ais,  who  in  his 
turn  had  introduced  him  to  the  greenroom  of  the  house  of  Moli^re. 
Other  theatres  were  diligently  visited  by  him  and  Forster,  when 
the  latter  arrived  on  a  visit ;  and  celebrities  were  polite  and  hospi- 
table to  their  distinguished  English  confj^ere.  With  these,  however, 
Dickens  was  not  cosmopolitan  enough  to  consort  except  in  passing ; 
the  love  of  literary  society  because  it  is  literary  society  was  at  no 
time  one  of  his  predilections  or  foibles.  The  streets  of  Paris  were 
to  him  more  than  its  salons^  more  even  than  its  theatres.  They 


DICKENS, 


are  so  to  a  larger  number  of  Englishmen  than  that  which  cares  to 
confess  it,  but  Dickens  would  have  been  the  last  to  disown  the 
impeachment.  They  were  the  proper  sphere  for  his  powers  of 
humorous  observation,  as  he  afterwards  showed  in  more  than  one 
descriptive  paper  as  true  to  life  as  any  of  his  London  Sketches, 
And,  moreover,  he  needed  the  streets  for  the  work  whicli  he  had  in 
hand.  Doinbey  and  Son  had  been  begun  at  Rosemont,  and  the 
first  of  its  twenty  monthly  numbers  had  been  published  in  October, 
1846.  No  reader  of  the  book  is  likely  to  forget  how,  after  writing 
the  chapter  which  relates  the  death  of  little  Paul,  Dickens,  during 
the  greater  part  of  the  night,  wandered  restlessly,  with  a  heavy 
heart,  about  the  Paris  streets.  Sooner,  however,  than  he  had 
intended,  his  residence  abroad  had  to  come  to  a  close ;  and  early 
in  1847  his  family  were  again  in  London. 

Dombey  and  So7i  has,  perhaps,  been  more  criticised  than  any 
other  amongst  the  stories  of  its  author;  and  yet  it  certainly 
is  not  the  one  which  has  been  least  admired,  or  least  loved. 
Dickens  himself,  in  the  brief  preface  which  he  afterwards  prefixed 
to  the  story,  assumed  a  half-defiant  air,  which  sits  ill  upon  the  most 
successful  author,  but  which  occasionally  he  was  tempted  to  assume. 
Before  condescending  to  defend  the  character  of  Mr.  Dombey  as  in 
accordance  with  both  probability  and  experience,  he  "  made  so  bold 
as  to  believe  that  the  faculty  (or  the  habit)  of  correctly  observing 
the  characters  of  men  is  a  rare  one."  Yet  though  the  drawing  of 
this  character  is  only  one  of  the  points  which  have  been  objected 
against  the  story,  not  only  did  the  book  at  the  time  of  publication 
far  surpass  its  predecessor  in  popularity,  but  it  has,  I  believe, 
always  preserved  to  itself  a  special  congregation  of  enthusiastic 
admirers.  Manifestly,  this  novel  is  one  of  its  author's  most  ambi- 
tious endeavours.  In  it,  more  distinctly  even  than  in  Chuzzleiuit, 
he  has  chosen  for  his  theme  one  of  the  chief  vices  of  human  nature, 
and  has  striven  to  show  what  pride  cannot  achieve,  what  it  cannot 
conquer,  what  it  cannot  withstand.  This  central  idea  gives  to  the 
story,  throughout  a  most  varied  succession  of  scenes,  a  unity  of 
action  to  be  found  in  few  of  Dickens's  earlier  works.  On  the  other 
hand,  Doinbey  and  Son  shares  with  these  earlier  productions,  and 
with  its  successor,  David  Copperfield,  the  freshness  of  invention 
and  spontaneous  flow  of  both  humour  and  pathos  which  at  times  are 
wanting  in  the  more  powerfully  conceived  and  more  carefully  con- 
structed romances  of  Dickens's  later  years.  If  there  be  any  force 
at  all  in  the  common  remark  that  the  most  interesting  part  of  tlie 
book  ends  together  with  the  life  of  little  Paul,  the  censure  fails 
upon  the  whole  design  of  the  author.  Little  Paul,  in  something 
besides  the  ordinary  meaning  of  the  words,  was  born  to  die ;  and 
though,  like  the  writer,  most  readers  may  have  dreaded  the  hour 
which  was  to  put  an  end  to  that  frail  life,  yet  in  this  case  there 
could  be  no  question  —  such  as  was  possible  in  the  story  of  Little 
Nell  —  of  any  other  issue.  Indeed,  deep  as  is  the  pathos  of  the 
closing  scene,  its  beauty  is  even  surpassed  by  those  which  precede 
it.    In  death  itself  there  is  release  for  a  child  as  for  a  man,  and  for 


LIBRARY 

UNlVERSfTf  OF  ILLINOIS 


52 


DICKENS, 


those  sitting  by  the  pillow  of  the  patient ;  but  it  is  the  gradual  ap- 
proach of  death  which  seems  hardest  of  all  for  the  w^atchers  to 
bear ;  it  is  the  sinking  of  hope  which  seems  even  sadder  than  its 
extinction.  What  old  fashion  could  that  be,  Paul  wondered  with  a 
palpitating  heart,  that  was  so  visibly  expressed  in  him,  so  plainly 
seen  by  so  many  people?  Every  heart  is  softened  and  e^^ery  eye 
dimmed  as  the  innocent  child  passes  on  his  way  to  his  grave.  The 
hand  of  God's  angel  is  on  him ;  he  is  no  longer  altogether  of  this 
world.  The  imagination  which  could  picture  and  present  this 
mysterious  haze  of  feeling,  through  which  the  narrative  moves,  half 
like  a  reality,  half  like  a  dream,  is  that  of  a  true  poet,  and  of  a 
great  one. 

What  even  the  loss  of  his  son  could  not  effect  in  Mr.  Dombey  is 
to  be  accomplished  in  the  progress  of  the  story  by  a  yet  stronger 
agency  than  sorrow.  His  pride  is  to  be  humbled  to  the  dust,  where 
he  is  to  be  sought  and  raised  up  by  the  love  of  his  despised  and  ill- 
used  daughter.  Upon  the  relations  between  this  pair,  accordingly, 
it  was  necessary  for  the  author  to  expend  the  greatest  care,  and 
upon  the  treatment  of  those  relations  the  criticism  to  which  the 
character  of  Mr.  Dombey  has  been  so  largely  subjected  must  sub- 
stantially turnT  The  unfavourable  judgments  passed  upon  it  have, 
in  my  opinion,  not  been  altogether  unjust.  The  problem  obviously 
was  to  show  how  the  father's  cold  indifference  towards  the  daughter 
gradually  becomes  jealousy,  as  he  finds  that  upon  her  is  concen- 
trated, first,  the  love  of  his  innocent  little  son,  and  then  that  of  his 
haughty  second  wife  ;  and  how  hereupon  this  jealousy  deepens  into 
hate.  But,  unless  we  are  to  suppose  that  Mr.  Dombey  hated  his 
daughter  from  the  first,  the  disfavour  shown  by  him  on  her  account 
to  young  Walter  Gay  remains  Vv-ithout  adequate  explanation.  His 
dislike  of  Florence  is  not  manifestly  founded  upon  his  jealousy  of 
what  Mrs.  Chick  calls  her  brother's  infatuation"  for  her;  and  the 
main  motives  at  work  in  the  unhappy  man  are  either  not  very  skil- 
fully kept  asunder,  or  not  very  intelligibly  intermixed.  Nor  are  the 
later  stages  of  the  relations  between  father  and  daughter  altogether 
satisfactorily  conceived.  The  momentary  yielding  of  Mr.  Dombey, 
after  his  *' coming  home"  with  his  new  wife,  is  natural  and  touch- 
ing ;  but  his  threat  to  visit  his  daughter  with  the  consequences  of 
her  step-mother's  conduct  is  sheer  brutality.  The  passage  in  which 
Mr.  Dombey's  ultimatum  to  Mrs.  Dombey  is  conveyed  by  him  in 
her  presence  through  a  third  person  is  so  artificial  as  to  fall  not  very 
far  short  of  absurdity.  The  closing  scene  which  leads  to  the  flight 
of  P^lorence  is  undeniably  powerful ;  but  it  is  the  development  of 
the  relations  between  the  pair  in  which  the  art  of  the  author  is  in 
my  judgment  occasionally  at  fault. 

As  to  the  general  effect  of  the  latter  part  of  the  story — or  rather 
of  its  main  plot  —  which  again  has  been  condemned  as  melodra- 
matic and  unnatural,  a  distinction  should  be  drawn  between  its 
incidents  and  its  characters.  Neither  Edith  Dombey  nor  Mr. 
Carker  is  a  character  of  real  life.  The  pride  of  the  former  comes 
very  near  to  bad  breeding,  and  her  lapses  into  sentiment  seem  arti- 


DICKENS. 


53 


ficial  lapses.  How  differently  Thackeray  would  have  managed  the 
*Miigh  words"  between  her  and  her  frivolous  mother!  how  differ- 
ently, for  that  matter,  he  has  managed  a  not  altogether  dissimilar 
scene  in  the  Newco/nes  between  Ethel  Newcome  and  old  Lady  Kew  ! 
As  for  Mr.  Carker,  with  his  v/hite  teeth  and  glistening  gums,  who 
calls  his  unhappy  brother  Spaniel,"  and  contemplates  a  life  of 
sensual  ease  in  Sicily,  he  has  the  semi-reality  of  the  stage.  Possibly 
the  French  stage  had  helped  to  suggest  the  sce)ie  de  la  pihce  between 
the  fugitives  at  Dijon  —  an  effective  situation,  but  one  which  many 
a  novelist  might  have  worked  out  not  less  skilfully  than  Dickens. 
His  own  master-hand,  however,  reasserts  itself  in  the  wondrously 
powerful  narrative  of  Carker's  flight  and  death.  Here  again  he 
excites  terror  —  as  in  the  same  book  he  had  evoked  pity  —  by  fore- 
shadowing, without  prematurely  revealing,  the  end.  We  know 
what  the  morning  is  to  bring  which  rises  in  awful  tranquillity  over 
the  victim  of  his  own  sins ;  and,  as  in  Turner's  wild  but  powerful 
picture,  the  engine  made  by  the  hand  of  man  for  peaceful  purposes 
seems  a  living  agent  of  wrath. ^ 

No  other  of  Dickens's  books  is  more  abundantly  stocked  than 
this  with  genuinely  comic  characters ;  but  nearly  all  of  them,  in 
accordance  with  the  pathetic  tone  which  is  struck  at  the  outset,  and 
which  never  dies  out  till  the  story  has  run  its  course,  are  in  a  more 
subdued  strain  of  humour.  Lord  Jeffrey  was,  I  think,  warranted 
in  his  astonishment  that  Dickens  should  devote  so  much  pains  to 
characters  like  Mrs.  Chick  and  Miss  Tox.  Probably  the  habit 
remained  with  him  from  his  earliest  times  of  authorship,  when  he 
had  not  always  distinguished  very  accurately  between  the  humor- 
ous and  the  bizarre.  But  Polly  and  the  Toodles  household,  Mrs. 
Pipchin  and  her  select  infantine  boarding-house,"  and  the  whole 
of  Doctor  Blimber's  establishment,  from  the  Doctor  himself  down 
to  Mr.  Toots,  and  up  again,  in  the  scale  of  intellect,  to  Mr.  Feeder, 
B.A.,  are  among  the  most  admirable  of  all  the  great  humorist's 
creations.  Against  this  ample  provision  for  her  poor  little  brother's 
nursing  and  training  Florence  has  to  set  but  her  one  Susan  Nipper ; 
but  she  is  a  host  in  herself,  an  absolutely  original  character  among 
the  thousands  of  soiibrettes  that  are  known  to  comedy  and  fiction, 
and  one  of  the  best  tonic  mixtures  ever  composed  out  of  much 
humour  and  not  a  few  grains  of  pathos.  Her  tartness  has  a  cool- 
ing flavour  of  its  own ;  but  it  is  the  Mrs.  Pipchinses  only  upon 
whom  she  acts,  as  their  type  acted  upon  her,  like  early  gooseber- 
ries." Of  course  she  has  a  favourite  figure  of  speech  belonging  to 
herself,  which  rhetoricians  would  probably  class  among  the  figures 

working  by  surplusage  :  "  — 

" '  Your  Toxes  and  your  Chickses  may  draw  out  my  two  front  double  teeth, 
Mrs.  Richards,  but  that's  no  reason  why  I  need  offer  'em  the  whole  set.' " 

1  It  is,  perhaps,  worth  pointing  out,  though  it  is  not  surprising,  that  Dickens  had  a 
strong  sense  of  what  I  may  call  the  poetry  of  the  railway-train.  Of  the  effect  of  the 
weird  S  ignabnafi' s  Story'xn  one  of  his  Christmas  numbers  it  is  not  very  easy  to  rid  one's 
self.  There  are  excellent  descriptions  of  the  rapidity  of  a  railway  journey  in  the  first 
chapter  of  The  Lazy  Tour,  and  in  another  Household  IVords  paper,  called  A  Flight. 


54 


DICKENS. 


Dickens  was  to  fall  very  largely  into  this  habit  of  labelling"  his 
characters,  as  it  has  been  called,  by  particular  tricks  or  terms  of 
speech ;  and  there  is  a  certain  excess  in  this  direction  already  in 
Dombey  and  Son,  where  not  only  Miss  Nipper  and  Captain  Cuttle 
and  Mr.  Toots,  but  Major  Bagstock,  too,  and  Cousin  Feenix,  are 
thus  furnished  forth.  But  the  invention  is  still  so  fresh  and  the 
play  of  humour  so  varied,  that  this  mannerism  cannot  be  said  as 
yet  seriously  to  disturb  them.  A  romantic  charm  of  a  peculiar 
kind  clings  to  honest  Captain  Cuttle  and  the  quaint  home  over 
which  he  mounts  guard  during  the  absence  of  its  ov/ner.  The 
nautical  colouring  and  concomitant  fun  apart  —  for  only  Smollett 
could  have  drawn  Jack  Bunsby's  fellow,  though  the  character  in  his 
hands  would  have  been  differently  accentuated  —  Dickens  has  never 
approached  more  nearly  to  the  manner  of  Sir  Walter  Scott  than  in 
this  singularly  attractive  part  of  his  book.  Elsewhere  the  story 
passes  into  that  sphere  of  society  in  describing  which  Dickens  was, 
as  a  novelist,  rarely  very  successful.  But  though  Edith  is  cold  and 
unreal,  there  is,  it  cannot  be  denied,  human  nature  in  the  pigments 
and  figments  of  her  hideous  old  mother ;  and,  to  outward  appear- 
ance at  all  events,  the  counterparts  of  her  apoplectic  admirer.  Major 
Bagstock,  still  pace  those  pavements  and  promenades  which  it  suits 
them  to  frequent.  Cousin  Feenix  is  likewise  very  far  from  impos- 
sible, and  is  besides  extremely  delightful  —  and  a  good  fellow  too 
at  bottom,  so  that  the  sting  of  the  satire  is  here  taken  away.  On 
the  other  hand,  the  meeting  between  the  sacs  ei  pa?c/iemi7is  at  Mr. 
Dombey 's  house  is  quite  out  of  focus. 

The  book  has  other  heights  and  depths,  and  pleasant  and  un- 
pleasant parts  and  passages.  But  enough  has  been  said  to  recall 
the  exuberant  creative  force,  and  the  marvellous  strength  of  pathos 
and  humour  which  Dombey  and  So7i  proves  that  Dickens,  now  near 
the  very  height  of  his  power  as  a  writer  of  fiction,  possessed.  In 
one  of  his  public  readings  many  years  afterwards,  when  he  was 
reciting  the  adventures  of  Little  Dombey,  he  narrates  that  '*a  very 
good  fellow,"  whom  he  noticed  in  the  stalls,  could  not  refrain  from 
wiping  the  tears  out  of  his  eyes  as  often  as  he  thought  that  Toots 
was  coming  on.  And  just  as  Toots  had  become  a  reality  to  this 
good  fellow,  so  Toots  and  Toots's  little  friend,  and  divers  other 
personages  in  this  story,  have  become  realities  to  half  the  world 
that  reads  the  English  tongue,  and  to  many  besides.  What  higher 
praise  could  be  given  to  this  w^onderful  book?  Of  all  the  works  of 
its  author  none  has  more  powerfully  and  more  permanently  taken 
hold  of  the  imagination  of  its  readers.  Though  he  conjured  up 
only  pictures  familiar  to  us  from  the  aspect  of  our  own  streets  and 
our  own  homes,  he  too  wielded  a  wizard's  wand. 

After  the  success  of  Dojnbey  it  might  have  seemed  that  nothing 
further  was  wanting  to  crown  the  prosperity  of  Dickens's  literary 
career.  While  the  publication  of  this  story  was  in  progress  he  had 
concluded  arrangements  for  the  issue  of  his  collected  writings,  in  a 
cheap  edition,  wliich  began  in  the  year  1847,  and  which  he  dedi- 
cated "to  the  English  people,  in  whose  approval,  if  the  books  be 


DICKENS. 


55 


true  in  spirit,  they  will  live,  and  out  of  whose  memory,  if  they  be 
false,  they  will  very  soon  die."  He  who  could  thus  proudly  appeal 
to  posterity  was  already,  beyond  all  dispute,  the  people's  chosen 
favourite  among  its  men  of  letters.  That  position  he  was  not  to 
lose  so  long  as  he  lived ;  but  even  at  this  time  the  height  had  not 
been  reached  to  which  (in  the  almost  unanimous  judgment  of  those 
who  love  his  writings)  he  was  in  his  next  work  to  attain. 


56 


DICKENS. 


CHAPTER  IV. 

DAVID  COPPERFIELD." 
[1847-X851.] 

The  five  years,  reckoned  roughly,  from  the  beginning  of  1847  to 
the  close  of  1851,  were  most  assuredly  the  season  in  which  the 
genius  of  Dickens  produced  its  richest  and  rarest  fruit.  When 
it  opened  he  was  still  at  work  upon  Dombey  ajid  Son ;  towards  its 
end  he  was  already  engaged  upon  the  earliest  portions  of  Bleak 
House.  And  it  was  during  the  interval  that  he  produced  a  book 
cherished  by  himself  with  an  affection  differing  in  kind,  as  well 
as  in  degree,  from  the  common  fondness  of  an  author  for  his  lit- 
erary offspring,  and  a  pearl  without  a  peer  amongst  the  later  fic- 
tions of  our  English  school  —  David  Copper-field,  To  this  period 
also  belong,  it  is  true,  not  a  few  lesser  productions  of  the  same 
ready  pen;  for  the  last  of  his  Christmas  books  was  written  in  1848, 
and  in  1850  his  weekly  periodical.  Household  Words ^  began  to  run 
its  course.  There  was  much  play,  too,  in  these  busy  years,  but 
all  more  or  less  of  the  kind  which  his  good-humoured  self-irony 
afterwards  very  correctly  characterised  :  — 

"  *  Play  ! '  said  Thomas  Idle.  '  Here  is  a  man  goes  systematically  tearing  him- 
self to  pieces,  and  putting  himself  through  an  incessant  course  of  training,  as 
if  he  were  always  under  articles  to  fight  a  match  for  the  champion's  belt,  and  he 
calls  it  *'  Play."  Play ! '  exclaimed  Thomas  Idle,  scornfully  contemplating  his 
one  boot  in  the  air  ;  '  you  can't  play.  You  don't  know  what  it  is.  You  make 
work  of  everything ! ' " 

**  A  man,"  added  the  same  easy  philosopher,  who  can  do  noth- 
ing by  halves  appears  to  me  to  be  a  fearful  man."  And  as  at  all 
times  in  Dickens's  life,  so  most  emphatically  in  these  years  when 
his  physical  powers  seemed  ready  to  meet  every  demand,  and  the 
elasticity  of  his  mind  seemed  equal  to  every  effort,  he  did  nothing 
by  halves.  Within  this  short  space  of  time  not  only  did  he  write 
his  best  book,  and  conduct  a  weekly  journal  of  solid  merit  through 
its  most  trying  stage,  but  he  also  established  his  reputation  as  one 
of  the  best  "  unpolitical  "  speakers  in  the  country  ;  and  as  an  ama- 
teur actor  and  manager  successfully  weathered  what  may  be  called 
three  theatrical  seasons,  to  the  labours  and  glories  of  which  it 
would  be  difficult  to  find  a  parallel  even  in  the  records  of  that  most 
exacting  of  all  social  amusements.    One  likes  to  think  of  him  in 


DICKKNS. 


57 


these  years  of  vigorous  manhood,  no  longer  the  fair  youth  with  the 
flowing  locks  of  Maclise's  charming  portrait,  but  not  yet,  I  suppose, 
altogether  the  commanding  and  ratiier  stern  presence  of  later  years. 
Mr.  Frith's  portrait  was  not  painted  till  1859,  ^-"Y  which  time  the 
face  occasionally  had  a  more  set  expression,  and  the  entire  person- 
ality a  more  weather-beaten  appearance,  than  this  well-known  pic- 
ture suggests.  But  even  eight  years  before  this  date,  when  Dickens 
was  acting  in  Lord  Lytton's  comedy  the  part  of  a  young  man  of 
mode,  Mr.  Sala's  well-known  comparison  of  his  outward  man  to 
**some  prosperous  sea-captain  home  from  a  sea-voyage,"  was 
thought  applicable  to  him  by  another  shrewd  observer,  Mr.  R.  H. 
Horne,  who  says  that,  fashionable     make-up"  notwithstanding, 

he  presented  a  figure  that  would  have  made  a  good  portrait  of 
a  Dutch  privateer  after  having  taken  a  capital  prize."  And  in  1856 
Ary  Scheffer,  to  whom  when  sitting  for  his  portrait  he  had  excused 
himself  for  being  a  difficult  subject,  received  the  apology  as 
strictly  his  due,  and  said,  with  a  vexed  air,  *  At  this  moment  v2on 
cher  Dickens,  you  look  more  like  an  energetic  Dutch  admiral  than 
anything  else;'  for  which  I  apologised  again."  In  1853,  in  the 
sympathetic  neighbourhood  of  Boulogne,  he  was  growing  a  mus- 
tache," and,  by  1856,  a  beard  of  the  Heiiri  Qiiatre  type  had  been 
added ;  but  even  before  that  time  v/e  may  well  believe  that  he  was, 
as  Mr.  Sala  says,  one  of  the  few  men  whose  individuality  was  not 
effaced  by  the  mournful  conventionality  of  evening-dress."  Even 
in  morning-dress  he  unconsciously  contrived,  born  actor  as  he  was, 
to  have  something  unusual  about  him ;  and,  if  report  speaks  the 
truth,  even  at  the  sea-side,  when  most  prodigal  of  ease,  he  was 
careful  to  dress  the  character. 

The  five  years  of  w^hich  more  especially  I  am  speaking  brought 
him  repeatedly  face  to  face  with  the  public,  and  within  hearing  of 
the  applause  that  was  becoming  more  and  more  of  a  necessity  to 
him.  They  were  thus  unmistakably  amongst  the  very  happiest 
3'ears  of  his  life.  The  shadow  that  was  to  fall  upon  his  home  can 
hardly  yet  have  been  visible  even  in  the  dim  distance.  For  this 
the  young  voices  were  too  many  and  too  fresh  around  him  behind 
the  garden-wall  in  Devonshire  Terrace,  and  amongst  the  autumnal 
corn  on  the  cliffs  at  Broadstairs.  They  are  all  in  great  force,"  he 
writes  to  his  wife,  in  September,  1850,  and  **  much  excited  with  the 
expectation  of  receiving  you  on  Friday ; "  and  I  only  wish  I  had 
space  to  quote  the  special  report  sent  on  this  occasion  to  the  absent 
mother  concerning  her  precocious  three-year-old.  What  sorrowful 
experiences  he  in  these  years  underwent  were  such  as  few^  men 
escape  amongst  the  chances  of  life.  In  1848  he  lost  the  sister  who 
had  been  the  companion  of  his  earliest  days,  and  three  years  later 
his  father,  whom  he  had  learned  to  respect  as  well  as  love.  Not 
long  afterwards  his  little  Dora,  the  youngest  of  his  flock,  was  sud- 
denly taken  from  him.  Meanwhile,  his  old  friends  clung  to  him. 
Indeed,  I  never  heard  that  he  lost  the  affection  of  any  one  who  had 
been  attached  to  him  ;  and  though  the  circle  of  his  real  intimates 
was  never  greatly  widened,  yet  he  was  on  friendly  or  even  familiar 


58 


DICKENS. 


terms  with  many  whose  names  belong  to  the  history  of  their  times. 
Amongst  these  were  the  late  Lord  Lytton  —  then  Sir  Edward 
Bulwer  Lytton  —  whose  splendid  abilities  were  still  devoted  mainly 
to  literary  labours,  and  between  whom  and  Dickens  there  were 
more  points  of  contrast  than  might  at  first  sight  appear.  Of 
Thackeray,  too,  he  seems  to  have  been  coming  to  know  more ;  and 
with  Leech,  more  especially  during  a  summer  sojourn  of  both  their 
families  at  Bonchurch,  in  1849,  grew  intimate.  Mr.  Monckton 
Milnes  — then,  and  since  as  Lord  Houghton,  semper  a7niciis^  seinpe?' 
hospes  both  to  successful  merit  and  to  honest  endeavour — Lord 
Carlisle,  and  others  who  adorned  the  great  world  under  more  than 
one  of  its  aspects,  were,  of  course,  welcome  friends  and  acquaint- 
ances ;  and  even  Carlyle  occasionally  found  his  way  to  the  house  of 
his  staunch  admirer,  though  he  might  declare  that  he  was,  in  the 
language  of  Mr.  Peggotty^s  house-keeper,  '*a  lorn  lone  creature, 
and  everything  went  contrairy  with  him." 

It  is  not  very  easy  to  describe  the  personal  habits  of  a  man  who 
is  found  seeing  the  spring  in  at  Brighton  and  the  autumn  out  at 
Broadstairs,  and  in  the  interval  "  strolling  "  through  the  chief  towns 
of  the  kingdom  at  the  head  of  a  large  company  of  ladies  and  gentle- 
men, according  to  the  description  which  he  puts  into  Mrs.  Gamp^s 
mouth,  "with  a  great  box  of  papers  under  his  arm,  a-talking  to 
everybody  wery  indistinct,  and  exciting  of  himself  dreadful."  But 
since  under  ordinary  circumstances  he  made,  even  in  outward 
matters  and  arrangements  of  detail,  a  home  for  himself  wherever  he 
was,  and  as  a  rule  cared  little  for  the  society  of  companions  whose 
ideas  and  ways  of  life  were  foreign  to  his  own,  certain  habits  had 
become  second  nature  to  him,  and  to  others  he  adhered  with 
sophistical  tenacity.  He  was  an  early  riser,  if  for  no  other  reason, 
because  every  man  in  whose  work  imagination  plays  its  part  must 
sometimes  be  alone  ;  and  Dickens  has  told  us  that  there  was  to  him 
something  incomparably  solemn  in  the  still  solitude  of  the  morning. 
But  it  was  only  exceptionally,  and  when  hard-pressed  by  the  neces- 
sities of  his  literary  labours,  that  he  wrote  before  breakfast ;  in 
general  he  was  contented  with  the  ordinary  working  hours  of  the 
morning,  not  often  writing  after  luncheon,  and,  except  in  early  life, 
never  in  the  evening.  Ordinarily,  when  engaged  on  a  work  of 
fiction,  he  considered  three  of  his  not  very  large  MS.  pages  a  good, 
and  four  an  excellent,  day's  work  ;  and,  while  very  careful  in  making 
his  corrections  clear  and  unmistakable,  he  never  rewrote  what  a 
morning's  labour  had  ultimately  produced.  On  the  other  hand,  he 
was  frequently  slow  in  beginning  a  story,  being,  as  he  himself  says, 
aifected  by  something  like  despondency  at  such  times,  or,  as  he 
elsewhere  humorously  puts  it,  ^'  going  round  and  round  the  idea,  as 
you  see  a  bird  in  his  cage  go  about  and  about  his  sugar  before  he 
touches  it."  A  temperate  liver,  he  was  at  the  same  time  a  zealous 
devotee  of  bodily  exercise.  He  had  not  as  yet  given  up  riding,  and 
is  found,  in  1848,  spending  the  whole  of  a  March  day,  with  Forster, 
Leech,  and  Mark  Lemon,  in  riding  over  every  part  of  Salisbury 
Plain.   But  walking  exercise  was  at  once  his  forte  and  his  fanaticism. 


DICKENS. 


59 


He  is  said  to  have  constructed  for  himself  a  tlieory  that,  to  every 
portion  of  the  day  given  to  intellectual  labour  should  correspond  an 
equal  number  of  hours  spent  in  walking;  and  frequently,  no  doubt, 
he  gave  up  his  morning's  chapter  before  he  had  begun  it,  entirely 
persuading  himself  that  he  was  under  a  moral  obligation"  to  do  his 
twenty  miles  on  the  road.  By  day  he  found  in  the  London  thor- 
oughfare stimulative  variety,  and  at  a  later  date  he  states  it  to  be 

one  of  his  fancies  that  even  his  idlest  walk  must  have  its  appointed 
destination ;  "  and  by  night,  in  seasons  of  intellectual  excitement, 
he  found  in  these  same  streets  the  refreshment  of  isolation  among 
crowds.  But  the  walks  he  loved  best  were  long  stretches  on  the 
cliffs  or  across  the  downs  by  the  sea,  where,  following  the  track  of 
his  breathers,"  one  half  expects  to  meet  him  coming  along  against 
the  wind  at  four  and  a  half  miles  an  hour,  the  very  embodiment  of 
energy  and  brimful  of  life. 

And  besides  this  energy  he  carried  with  him,  wheresoever  he 
pitched  his  tent,  what  was  the  second  cause  of  his  extraordinary 
success  in  so  much  of  the  business  of  life  as  it  fell  to  him  to 
perform.  He  hated  disorder  as  Sir  Artegal  hated  injustice  ;  and  if 
there  was  anything  against  which  he  took  up  his  parable  with  burn- 
ing indignation,  it  was  slovenliness,  and  half-done  work,  and  shod- 
diness  "  of  all  kinds.  His  love  of  order  made  him  always  the  most 
regular  of  men.       Everything  with  him,"  Miss  Hogarth  told  me, 

went  as  by  clock-work  ;  his  movements,  his  absences  from  home, 
and  the  times  of  his  return  were  all  fixed  beforehand,  and  it  was 
seldom  that  he  failed  to  adhere  to  what  he  had  fixed."  Like  most 
men  endowed  with  a  superfluity  of  energy,  he  prided  himself  on  his 
punctuality.  He  could  not  live  in  a  room  or  in  a  house  till  he  had 
put  every  piece  of  furniture  into  its  proper  place,  nor  could  he  begin 
to  work  till  all  his  writing-gear  was  at  hand,  with  no  item  missing 
or  misplaced.  Yet  he  did  not,  like  so  many,  com.bine  with  these 
habits  and  tendencies  a  saving  disposition.  No  man,"  he  said  of 
himself,  attaches  less  importance  to  the  possession  of  money,  or 
less  disparagement  to  the  want  of  it,  than  I  do."  His  circum- 
stances, though  easy,  were  never  such  as  to  warrant  a  display  to 
which,  perhaps,  certain  qualities  of  his  character  might  have  in- 
cHned  him ;  even  at  a  much  later  date  he  described  himself  — 
rather  oddly  perhaps  —  as  a  man  of  moderate  savings,  always 
supporting  a  very  expensive  public  position."  But,  so  far  as  I  can 
gather,  he  never  had  a  reasonable  want  which  he  could  not  and  did 
not  satisfy,  though  at  the  same  time  he  cared  for  very  few  of  the 
pursuits  or  amusements  that  are  apt  to  drain  much  larger  resources 
than  his.  He  never  had  to  think  twice  about  country  or  sea-side 
quarters ;  wherever  it  might  suit  his  purpose  or  fancy  to  choose 
them,  at  one  of  his  south  coast  haunts  or,  for  his  wife's  health,  at 
Malvern,  thither  be  went :  and  when  the  whim  seized  him  for  a  trip 
en  garco7i  to  any  part  of  England  or  to  Paris,  he  had  only  to  bid 
the  infallible  Anne  to  pack  his  trunk.  He  was  a  provident  as  well 
as  an  affectionate  father ;  but  the  cost  of  educating  his  numerous 
family  seems  to  have  caused  him  no  serious  anxiety.    In  1849  he 


6o 


DICKENS, 


sent  his  eldest  son  to  Eton.  And  while  he  had  sworn  a  kind  of 
ve7idetta  against  begging-letter  writers,  and  afterwards  used  to  parry 
the  attacks  of  his  pertinacious  enemies  by  means  of  carefully-pre- 
pared written  forms,  his  hand  seems  to  have  been  at  all  times  open 
for  charity. 

Some  of  these  personal  characteristics  of  Dickens  were  to  be 
brought  out  with  remarkable  vividness  during  the  period  of  his  life 
which  forms  the  special  subject  of  the  present  chapter.  Never  was 
he  more  thoroughly  himself  than  as  a  theatrical  manager  and  actor, 
surrounded  by  congenial  associates.  He  starred  it  to  his  heart's 
content  at  the  country  seat  of  his  kind  Lausanne  friends,  Mr.  and 
Mrs.  Watson.  But  the  first  occasion  on  which  he  became  publicly 
known  in  both  the  above-mentioned  capacities  was  the  reproduction 
of  the  amateur  performance  of  Every  Man  in  His  Hu7no7i?\  This 
time  the  audiences  were  to  be  in  Manchester  and  Liverpool,  where 
it  was  hoped  that  a  golden  harvest  might  be  reaped  for  Leigh  Hunt, 
who  was  at  that  time  in  sore  straits.  As  it  chanced,  a  civil-list  pen- 
sion was  just  about  this  time  — 1847  —  conferred  upon  the  most 
unaffectedly  graceful  of  all  modern  writers  of  English  verse.  It 
was  accordingly  resolved  to  divert  part  of  the  proceeds  of  the 
undertaking  in  favour  of  a  worthy  playwright,  the  author  of  Pajil 
Pry.  The  comedy  was  acted  with  brilliant  success  at  Manchester, 
on  July  26,  and  at  Liverpool  two  days  later;  and  then  the  mana- 
gerial miseries,"  which  Dickens  had  enjoyed  with  his  whole  heart 
and  soul,  were  over  for  the  nonce.  Already,  however,  in  the  fol- 
lowing year,  1848,  an  excellent  reason  was  found  for  their  recom- 
mencement ;  and  nine  performances  of  Ben  Jonson's  play,  this 
time  alternated  with  The  Meny  Wives  of  Windsor^  were  given  by 
Dickens's  company  of  amateurs"  —  the  expression  is  his  own  — 
at  the  Haymarket,  and  in  the  theatres  of  five  of  the  largest  towns  in 
the  kingdom,  for  the  benefit  of  Sheridan  Knowles.  Nothing  could 
have  been  more  honourable  than  Dickens's  readiness  to  serve  the 
interests  of  an  actor  with  whom,  but  for  his  own  generous  temper, 
he  would  only  a  few  months  before  have  been  involved  in  a  wordy 
quarrel.  In  The  Merry  Wives,  the  manager  acted  Justice  Shallow 
to  Mark  Lemon's  Falstaff.  Dame  Quickly  was  played  by  Mrs.  Cow- 
den  Clarke,  who  speedily  became  a  favourite  correspondent  of  Dick- 
ens. But  the  climax  of  these  excitements  arrived  in  the  year  of 
wonders,  1851,  when,  with  a  flourish  of  trumpets  resounding  through 
the  world  of  fashion  as  well  as  of  letters,  the  comedy  Not  so  Bad 
as  We  Seein,  written  for  the  occasion  by  Bulwer  Lytton,  was  per- 
formed under  Dickens's  management  at  Devonshire  House,  in  the 
presence  of  the  Queen,  for  the  benefit  of  the  Guild  of  Literature 
and  Art.  The  object  was  a  noble  one,  though  the  ultimate  re- 
sult of  the  scheme  has  been  an  almost  pitiable  failure  ;  and  nothing 
was  spared,  by  the  host  or  the  actors,  to  make  the  effect  worthy  of 
it.  While  some  of  the  most  popular  men  of  letters  took  parts 
in  the  clever  and  effective  play,  its  scenery  was  painted  by  some  of 
the  most  eminent  among  the  English  artists.  Dickens  was  fired 
by  the  ardour  of  the  enterprise,  and,  proceeding  on  his  principle 


DICKENS. 


6l 


that  the  performance  could  not  possibly  be  a  success  if  the  small- 
est pepper-corn  of  arrangement  were  omitted,^'  covered  himself 
and  his  associates  with  glory.  From  Devonshire  House  play  and 
theatre  were  transferred  to  the  Hanover  Square  Rooms,  where  the 
farce  of  Afr.  Nightingale's  Diary  was  included  in  the  performance, 
of  which  some  vivid  reminiscences  have  been  published  by  one  of 
the  few  survivors  of  that  noble  company,  Mr.  R.  H.  Home.  Other 
accounts  corroborate  his  recollections  of  the  farce,  which  was  the 
triumph  of  g^g,"  and  would  have  been  reckoned  a  masterpiece  in 
the  old  coinniedia  deW  arte.  The  characters  played  by  Dickens 
included  Sam  Weller  turned  waiter;  a  voluble  barrister  by  the 
name  of  Mr.  Gabblewig ;  a  hypochondriac  suffering  from  a  prescrip- 
tion of  mustard  and  milk ;  the  Gampish  mother  of  a  charity-boy 
(Mr.  Egg)  ;  and  her  brother,  a  stone-deaf  old  sexton,  who  ap- 
peared to  be  *'at  least  ninety  years  of  age."  The  last-named  as- 
sumption seems  to  have  been  singularly  effective  :  — 

"  After  repeated  shoutings  ('  It's  of  no  use  whispering  to  me,  young  man ')  of 
the  word  'buried  '  —  ''Brewed !  Oh,  yes,  sir,  I  have  brewed  many  a  good  gallon 
of  ale  in  my  time.  The  last  batch  I  brewed,  sir,  was  finer  than  all  the  rest  — 
the  best  ale  ever  brewed  in  the  county.  It  used  to  be  called  in  our  parts  here, 
"  Samson  with  his  hair  on  !  "  In  allusion '  —  here  his  excitement  shook  the  tremu- 
lous frame  into  coughing  and  wheezing  —  '  in  allusion  to  its  great  strength.' 
He  looked  from  from  face  to  face  to  see  if  his  feat  was  duly  appreciated,  and  his 
venerable  jest  understood  by  those  around ;  and  then,  softly  repeating,  with  a 
glimmering  smile,  'in  allusion  to  its  great  strength,'  he  turned  about,  and  made 
his  exit,  like  one  moving  towards  his  own  grave  while  he  thinks  he  is  following 
the  funeral  of  another." 

From  London  the  company  travelled  into  the  country,  where 
their  series  of  performances  was  not  closed  till  late  in  the  succeed- 
ing year,  1852.  Dickens  was  from  first  to  last  the  manager,  and 
the  ruling  spirit  of  the  undertaking.  Amongst  his  latest  recruits, 
Mr.  Wilkie  Collins  is  specially  mentioned  by  Forster.  The  ac- 
quaintance which  thus  began  soon  ripened  into  a  close  and  lasting 
friendship,  and  became,  with  the  exception  of  that  with  Forster 
himself,  the  most  important  of  all  Dickens's  personal  intimacies  for 
the  history  of  his  career  as  an  author. 

Speech-making  was  not  in  quite  the  same  sense,  or  to  quite  the 
same  degree,  as  amateur  acting  and  managing,  a  voluntary  labour 
on  Dickens's  part.  Not  that  he  was  one  of  those  to  whom  the  task 
of  occasionally  addressing  a  public  audience  is  a  pain  or  even  a 
burden.  Indeed,  he  was  a  born  orator;  for  he  possessed  both  that 
strong  and  elastic  imaginative  power  which  enables  a  man  to  place 
himself  at  once  in  sympathy  with  his  audience,  and  that  gift  of 
speech,  pointed,  playful,  and  where  necessary  impetuous,  which 
pleads  well  in  any  assembly  for  any  cause.  He  had,  moveover,  the 
personal  qualifications  of  a  handsome  manly  presence,  a  sympa- 
thetic eye,  and  a  fine  flexible  voice,  which,  as  his  own  hints  on 
public  speaking  show,  he  managed  with  care  and  intelligence.  He 
had,  he  says,  ''fought  with  beasts  (oratorically)  in  divers  arenas."" 
But  though  a  speaker  in  whom  ease  bred  force,  and  force  ease,  he 


62 


DICKENS. 


was  the  reverse  of  a  mere  builder  of  phrases  and  weaver  of  periods. 

Mere  holding  forth,"  he  declared,  I  utterly  detest,  abominate, 
and  abjure.'^  His  innate  hatred  of  talk  for  mere  talk's  sake  had 
doubtless  been  intensified  by  his  early  reporting  experiences,  and 
by  what  had  become  his  stereotyped  notion  of  our  parliamentary 
system.  At  the  Administration  Reform  meeting  in  1855,  he  stated 
that  he  had  never  before  attended  a  public  meeting.  On  the  other 
hand,  he  had  been  for  already  several  years  in  great  request  for 
meetings  of  a  different  kind,  concerned  with  the  establishment  or 
advancement  of  educational  or  charitable  institutions  in  London 
and  other  great  towns  of  the  country.  His  addresses  from  the 
chair  were  often  of  remarkable  excellence ;  and  this  not  merely 
because  crowded  halls  and  increased  subscription-lists  were  their 
concomitants,  and  because  the  happiness  of  his  humour  —  never 
out  of  season,  and  even  on  such  occasions  often  singularly  prompt 

—  sent  every  one  home  in  good  spirits.  In  these  now  forgotten 
speeches  on  behalf  of  Athenaeums  and  Mechanics'  Institutes,  or  of 
actors'  and  artists'  and  newsmen's  charities,  their  occasional  advo- 
cate never  appears  occasional.  Instead  of  seeming  to  have  just 
mastered  his  brief  while  the  audience  was  taking  its  seats,  or  to 
have  become  for  the  first  time  deeply  interested  in  his  subject  in  the 
interval  between  his  soup  and  his  speech,  the  cause  which  Dickens 
pleads  never  has  in  him  either  an  imperfectly  formed  or  a  half- 
indiflferent  representative.  Amongst  many  charming  illustrations 
of  a  vein  of  oratory  in  which  he  has  been  equalled  by  very  few, 
if  by  any,  public  men  of  his  own  or  the  succeeding  generation,  I 
will  instance  only  one  address,  though  it  belongs  to  a  considerably 
later  date  than  the  time  of  David  Copperfield.  Nothing,  however, 
that  Dickens  has  ever  written  —  not  even  David  Copperfield  itself 

—  breathes  a  tenderer  sympathy  for  the  weakness  of  unprotected 
childhood  than  the  beautiful  little  speech  delivered  by  him  on  Feb- 
ruary 9,  1858,  on  behalf  of  the  London  Hospital  for  Sick  Children. 
Beginning  with  some  touches  of  humour  concerning  the  spoilt  chil- 
dren of  the  rich,  the  orator  goes  on  to  speak  of  the  spoilt  chil- 
dren" of  the  poor,  illustrating  with  concrete  directness  both  the 
humorous  and  the  pathetic  side  of  his  subject,  and  after  a  skilfully 
introduced  sketch  of  the  capabilities  and  wants  of  the  *'  infant  insti- 
tution "  for  which  he  pleads,  ending  with  an  appeal,  founded  on  a 
fancy  of  Charles  Lamb,  to  the  support  of  the  "dream-children" 
belonging  to  each  of  his  hearers:  "  the  dear  child  you  love,  the 
dearer  child  you  have  lost,  the  child  you  might  have  had,  the  child 
you  certainly  have  been."  This  is  true  eloquence,  of  a  kind  which 
aims  at  something  besides  opening  purse-strings.  In  185 1  he  had 
spoken  in  the  same  vein  of  mixed  humour  and  pathos  on  behalf  of 
his  clients,  the  poor  actors,  when,  unknown  to  him,  a  little  child 
of  his  Own  was  lying  dead  at  home.  But  in  these  years  of  his  life, 
as  indeed  at  all  times,  his  voice  was  at  the  service  of  such  causes  as 
had  his  sympathy;  it  was  heard  at  Birmingham,  at  Leeds,  at  Glas- 
gow; distance  was  of  little  moment  to  his  energetic  nature;  and  as 
^o  trouble,  how  could  he  do  anything  by  halves.^ 


DICKENS. 


63 


There  was  yet  a  third  kind  of  activity,  distinct  from  that  of  liter- 
ary work  pure  and  simple,  in  which  Dickens  in  these  years  for  the 
first  time  systematically  engaged.  It  has  been  seen  how  he  had 
long  cherished  the  notion  of  a  periodical  conducted  by  himself,  and 
marked  by  a  unity  of  design  which  should  make  it  in  a  more  than 
ordinary  sense  his  own  paper.  With  a  genius  like  this,  which 
attached  itself  to  the  concrete,  very  much  depended  at  the  outset 
upon  the  choice  of  a  title.  The  Cricket  could  not  serve  again,  and 
for  some  time  the  notion  of  an  omnipresent  Shadow^  with  somc- 
tliing,  if  possible,  tacked  to  it  expressing  the  notion  of  its  being 
cheerful,  useful,  and  always  welcome,"  seemed  to  promise  excel- 
lently. For  a  rather  less  ambitious  design,  however,  a  rather  less 
ambitious  title  was  sought,  and  at  last  fortunately  found,  in  the 
phrase,  rendered  proverbial  by  Shakspeare,  HouseJwld  Words.''^ 
*'  We  hope,"  he  wrote  a  few  weeks  before  the  first  number  appeared, 
on  March  30,  1850,  "to  do  some  solid  good,  and  we  mean  to  be  as 
cheery  and  pleasant  as  we  can."  But  Household  Words,  which  in 
form  and  in  cost  was  to  be  a  paper  for  the  multitude,  was  to  be 
something  more  than  agreeable  and  useful  and  cheap.  It  was  to 
help  in  casting  out  the  many  devils  that  had  taken  up  their  abode 
in  popular  periodical  literature,  the  bastards  of  the  Mountain," 
and  the  foul  fiends  who  dealt  in  infamous  scurrility,  and  to  do  this 
with  the  aid  of  a  charm  more  potent  than  the  most  lucid  argument 
and  the  most  abundant  facts.  *'In  the  bosoms  of  the  young  and 
old,  of  the  well-to-do  and  of  the  poor,"  says  the  Preli;/nnary  Word 
in  the  first  number,  ^*  we  would  tenderly  cherish  that  light  of  fancy 
which  is  inherent  in  the  human  breast."  To  this  purpose  it  was 
the  editor's  constant  and  deliberate  endeavour  to  bind  his  paper. 

Keep  '  Household  Words'  imaginative  ! "  is  the  solemn  and 
continual  Conductorial  Injunction "  which  three  years  after  the 
foundation  of  the  journal  he  impresses,  with  the  artful  aid  of  capi- 
tals, upon  his  faithful  coadjutor,  Mr.  W.  H.  Wills.  In  his  own 
contributions  he  was  not  forgetful  of  this  maxim,  and  the  most 
important  of  them,  the  serial  story,  Hard  Tiines,  was  written  with 
the  express  intention  of  pointing  it  as  a  moral. 

There  are,  I  suppose,  in  addition  to  the  many  mysterious  func- 
tions performed  by  the  editor  of  a  literary  journal,  two  of  the  very 
highest  significance ;  in  the  first  place,  the  choice  of  his  contribu- 
tors, and  then,  if  the  expression  may  be  used,  the  management  of 
them.  In  both  respects  but  one  opinion  seems  to  exist  of  Dick- 
ens's admirable  qualities  as  an  editor.  Out  of  the  many  contribu- 
tors to  HotiseJiold  Words,  and  its  kindred  successor,  All  the  War 
Round  —  some  of  whom  are  happily  still  among  living  writers  —  it 
would  be  invidious  to  select  for  mention  a  few  in  proof  of  the 
editor's  discrimination.  But  it  will  not  be  forgotten  that  the  first 
number  of  the  earlier  journal  contained  the  beginning  of  a  tale  by 
Mrs.  Gaskell,  whose  name  will  long  remain  a  household  word  in 
England,  both  North  and  South.  And  a  periodical  could  hardly 
be  deemed  one-sided  which  included  among  its  contributors  schol- 
ars and  writers  of  the  distinction  belonging  to  the  names  of  Forster 


64 


DICKENS. 


and  Mr.  Henry  Morley,  together  with  humorous  observers  of  men 
and  things  such  as  Mr.  Sala  and  Albert  Smith.  On  the  other  hand, 
Household  Words  had  what  every  literary  journal  ought  to  have,  an 
individuality  of  its  own ;  and  this  individuality  was,  of  course,  that 
of  its  editor.  The  mannerisms  of  Dickens's  style  afterwards  came 
to  be  imitated  by  some  among  his  contributors ;  but  the  general 
unity  perceptible  in  the  journal  was  the  natural  and  legitimate 
result  of  the  fact  that  it  stood  under  the  independent  control  of  a 
vigorous  editor,  assisted  by  a  sub-editor — Mr.  W.  H.  Wills  —  of 
rare  trustworthiness.  Dickens  had  a  keen  eye  for  selecting  sub- 
jects from  a  definite  field,  a  ready  skill  for  shaping,  if  necessary, 
the  articles  accepted  by  him,  and  a  genius  for  providing  them  with 
expressive  and  attractive  titles.  Fiction  and  poetry  apart,  these 
articles  have  mostly  a  social  character  or  bearing,  although  they 
often  deviate  into  the  pleasant  paths  of  literature  or  art ;  and  usu- 
ally, but  by  no  means  always,  the  scenes  or  associations  with  which 
they  connect  themselves  are  of  England,  English. 

Nothing  could  surpass  the  unflagging  courtesy  shown  by  Dickens 
towards  his  contributors,  great  or  small,  old  or  new,  and  his  patient 
interest  in  their  endeavours,  while  he  conducted  Household  Words ^ 
and  afterwards  All  the  Year  Roimd,  Of  this  there  is  evidence 
enough  to  make  the  records  of  the  office  in  Wellington  Street  a 
pleasant  page  in  the  history  of  journalism.  He  valued  a  good 
workman  when  he  found  him,  and  was  far  too  reasonable  and  gener- 
ous to  put  his  own  stamp  upon  all  good  metal  that  passed  through 
his  hands.  Even  in  his  Christmas  Numbers  he  left  the  utmost 
possible  freedom  to  his  associates.  Where  he  altered  or  modified 
it  was  as  one  who  had  come  to  know  the  pulse  of  the  public ;  and 
he  was  not  less  considerate  with  novices,  than  he  was  frank  and 
explicit  with  experts,  in  the  writer's  art.  The  articles  in  his  journal 
being  anonymous,  he  was  not  tempted  to  use  names  as  baits  for  the 
public,  though  many  who  wrote  for  him  were  men  or  w^omen  of  high 
literary  reputation.  And  he  kept  his  doors  open.  While  some 
editors  deem  it  their  duty  to  ward  off  would-be  contributors,  as 
some  ministers  of  state  think  it  theirs  to  get  rid  of  deputations, 
Dickens  sought  to  ignore  instead  of  jealously  guarding  the  boun- 
daries of  professional  literature.  Nothing  in  this  way  ever  gave 
him  greater  delight  than  to  have  welcomed  and  published  several 
poems  sent  to  him  under  a  feigned  name,  but  which  he  afterwards 
discovered  to  be  the  first-fruits  of  the  charming  poetical  talent  of 
Miss  Adelaide  Procter,  the  daughter  of  his  old  friend,  Barry 
Cornwall." 

In  the  preparation  of  his  own  papers,  or  of  those  which,  like  the 
Christmas  Numbers,  he  composed  conjointly  with  one  or  more  of 
his  familiars,  he  spared  no  labour,  and  thought  no  toil  too  great. 
At  times,  of  course,  he,  like  all  periodical  writers  who  cannot  be 
merry  every  Wednesday  or  caustic  every  Saturday,  felt  the  pressure 
of  the  screw.  *'As  to  two  comic  articles,"  he  exclaims  on  one  occa- 
sion, or  two  any  sort  of  articles,  out  of  me,  that's  the  intensest  ex- 
treme of  no-goism.*"    But,  as  a  rule,  no  great  writer  ever  ran  more 


DICKENS. 


65 


gaily  under  his  self-imposed  yoke.  His  Uncommercial  Travels," 
as  he  at  a  later  date  happily  christened  them,  familiarised  him  with 
whatever  parts  or  aspects  of  London  his  long  walks  had  still  left  un- 
explored ;  and  he  was  as  conscientious  in  hunting  up  the  details  of  a 
complicated  subject  as  in  finding  out  the  secrets  of  an  obscure  pur- 
suit or  trade.  Accomplished  antiquarians  and  ''commissioners" 
assisted  him  in  his  labours  ;  but  he  was  no  roi  fain ea fit  on  the  edi- 
torial sofa  which  he  so  complacently  describes.  Whether  he  was  tak- 
ing A  Walk  in  a  Workhouse,  or  knocking  at  the  door  of  another 
with  the  supernumerary  waifs  in  Whitechapel,  or  On  (night)  Dnfy 
with  Inspector  Field  among  the  worst  of  the  London  slums,  he  was 
always  ready  to  see  with  his  own  eyes  ;  after  which  the  photographic 
power  of  his  pen  seemed  always  capable  of  doing  the  rest.  Oc- 
casionally he  treats  topics  more  properly  journalistic,  but  he  is  most 
delightful  when  he  takes  his  ease  in  his  English  or  his  French 
Watering-place,  or  carries  his  readers  with  him  on  A  Flight  to 
Paris,  bringing  before  them,  as  it  were,  in  breathless  succession, 
every  inch  of  the  familiar  journey.  Happiest  of  all  is  he  when,  with 
his  friend  Mr.  Wilkie  Collins  —  this,  however,  not  until  the  autumn 
of  1857  —  he  starts  on  The  Lazy  Tour  of  Two  Idle  Apprentices, 
the  earlier  chapters  of  which  furnish  some  of  the  best  specimens  of 
his  most  humorous  prose.  Neither  at  the  same  time  does  he  forget 
himself  to  enforce  the  claim  of  his  journal  to  strengthen  the  im- 
aginary side  of  literature.  In  an  assumed  character  he  allows  a 
veteran  poet  to  carry  him  By  Rail  to  Parnassus,  and  even  good- 
humouredly  banters  an  old  friend,  George  Cruikshank,  for  having 
committed  Frauds  on  the  Fairies  by  re-editing  legendary  lore  with 
the  view  of  inculcating  the  principle  of  total  abstinence. 

Such,  then,  were  some  of  the  channels  in  which  the  intense  mental 
and  physical  energy  of  Dickens  found  a  congenial  outlet  in  these  busy 
years.  Yet  in  the  very  midst  of  this  multifarious  activity  the  mys- 
terious and  controlling  power  of  his  genius  enabled  him  to  collect 
himself  for  the  composition  of  a  work  of  fiction  which,  as  I  have 
already  said,  holds,  and  will  always  continue  to  hold,  a  place  of  its 
own  among  his  works.  *' Of  all  my  books,"  he  declares,  "  I  like 
this  tlie  best.  It  will  be  easily  believed  that  I  am  a  fond  parent  to 
every  child  of  my  fancy,  and  that  no  one  can  ever  love  that  family 
as  dearly  as  1  love  them.  But,  like  many  fond  parents,  I  have  in 
my  heart  of  hearts  a  favourite  child  —  and  his  name  is  David  Cop- 
PERFIELD ! "  He  parted  from  the  story  with  a  pang,  and  when  in 
after  life  he  returned  to  its  perusal,  he  was  hardly  able  to  master 
the  emotions  which  it  recalled ;  perhaps  even  he  hardly  knew  what 
the  effort  of  its  production  had  cost  him. 

The  first  number  of  David  Coppejfield  was  published  in  May,  1849 
—  the  last  in  November,  1850.  To  judge  from  the  difficulty  which 
Dickens  found  in  choosing  a  title  for  his  story  —  of  which  difnculty 
plentiful  evidence  remains  in  MS.  at  South  Kensington — he  must 
have  been  fain  to  delay  longer  even  than  usual  on  the  threshold. 
In  the  end  the  name  of  the  hero  evolved  itself  out  of  a  series  of 
transformations,  from  Trotfield  and  Trotbury  to  Copperboy,  Cop- 


66 


DICKENS, 


perstone  —  Copperfull "  being  reserved  as  a  lectio  varians  for  Mrs. 
Crupp  —  and  Copperjield.  Then  at  last  the  pen  could  fall  seriously 
to  work,  and,  proceeding  slowly  at  first — for  the  first  page  of  the 
MS.  contains  a  great  number  of  alterations  —  dip  itself  now  into 
black,  now  into  blue  ink,  and  in  a  small  writing,  already  contrast- 
ing with  the  bolder  hand  of  earlier  days,  produce  page  upon  page 
of  an  incomparable  book.  No  doubt  what  so  irresistibly  attracted 
Dickens  to  David  Copperjield^  and  what  has  since  fascinated  many 
readers,  more  or  less  conscious  of  the  secret  of  the  charm,  is  the 
autobiographical  element  in  the  story.  Until  the  publication  of  For- 
ster's  Life  no  reader  of  Copperfield  could  be  aware  of  the  pang  it  must 
have  cost  Dickens  to  lay  bare,  though  to  unsuspecting  eyes,  the  story 
of  experiences  v/hich  he  had  hitherto  kept  all  but  absolutely  secret, 
and  to  which  his  own  mind  could  not  recur  without  a  quivering 
sensitiveness.  No  reader  could  trace,  as  the  memory  of  Dickens 
always  must  have  traced,  some  of  the  most  vivid  of  those  experi- 
ences, imbued  though  they  were  with  the  tints  of  a  delightfully  pla)^- 
ful  humor,  in  the  doings  and  dealings  of  Mr.  Wilkins  Micawber, 
whose  original,  by  a  strange  coincidence,  was  passing  tranquilly 
away  out  of  life,  while  his  comic  counterpart  was  blossoming  into 
a  whimsical  immortality.  And  no  reader  could  divine,  what  very 
probably  even  the  author  may  hardly  have  ventured  to  confess  to 
himself,  that  in  the  lovely  little  idyl  of  the  loves  of  Doady  and  Dora 
—  v/ith  Jip,  as  Dora's  father  might  have  said,  intervening  —  there 
w^ere,  besides  the  reminiscences  of  an  innocent  juvenile  amour,  the 
vestiges  of  a  man^s  unconfessed  though  not  altogether  unrepressed 
disappointment  —  the  sense  that  '*  there  was  always  something  want- 
ing." But  in  order  to  be  affected  by  a  personal  or  autobiographical 
element  in  a  fiction  or  poem,  it  is  by  no  means  necessary  to  be  aware 
of  its  actual  bearing  and  character,  or  even  of  its  very  existence. 
Ajnelia  would  gain  little  by  illustrative  notes  concerning  the  expe- 
riences of  the  first  Mrs.  Fielding.  To  excite  in  a  work  of  fiction 
the  peculiar  kind  of  interest  of  which  I  am  speaking,  the  existence 
of  an  autobiographical  substratum  need  not  be  apparent  in  it,  nor 
need  its  presence  be  even  suspected.  Enough,  if  it  be  there.  But 
it  had  far  better  be  away  altogether,  unless  the  novelist  has  so  thor- 
oughly fused  this  particular  stream  of  metal  with  the  mass  filling  his 
mould  that  the  result  is  an  integral  artistic  whole.  Such  was,  how- 
ever, the  case  with  David  Copperjield,  which  of  all  Dickens's  fictions 
is  on  the  whole  the  most  perfect  as  a  work  of  art.  Personal  remi- 
niscences which  lay  deep  in  the  author's  breast  are,  as  effects,  har- 
monised with  local  associations  old  and  new.  Thus,  Yarmouth, 
painted  in  the  story  with  singular  poetic  truthfulness,  had  only  quite 
recently  been  seen  by  Dickens  for  the  first  time,  on  a  holiday  trip. 
His  imagination  still  subdued  to  itself  all  the  elements  with  which 
he  worked ;  and,  whatever  may  be  thought  of  the  construction  of 
this  story,  none  of  his  other  books  equals  it  in  that  harmony  of  tone 
v/hich  no  artist  can  secure  unless  by  recasting  all  his  materials. 

As  to  the  construction  of  Da^rid  Copperjield;  however,  I  frankly 
confess  that  I  perceive  no  serious  fault  in  it.    It  is  a  story  with  a 


DICKENS. 


67 


plot,  and  not  merely  a  string  of  adventures  and  experiences,  like 
little  Davy^s  old  favourites  up-stairs  at  Blunderstonc.  In  the  con- 
duct of  this  plot  blemishes  may  here  and  there  occur.  The  boy's 
flight  from  London,  and  the  direction  which  it  takes,  are  insuffi- 
ciently accounted  for.  A  certain  amount  of  obscurity,  as  w^ell  per- 
haps as  of  improbability,  pervades  the  relations  between  Uriah  and 
the  victim,  round  whom  the  unspeakably  slimy  thing  writhes  and 
wriggles.  On  the  other  hand,  the  mere  conduct  of  the  story  has 
much  that  is  beautiful  in  it.  Thus,  there  is  real  art  in  the  way  in 
which  the  scene  of  Barkis's  death  —  written  with  admirable  moder- 
ation—  prepares  for  the  greater  loss''  at  hand  for  the  mourning 
family.  And  in  the  entire  treatment  of  his  hero's  double  love  story 
Dickens  has,  to  my  mind,  avoided  that  discord  which,  in  spite  of 
himself,  jars  upon  the  reader  both  in  Es?)toiid  and  in  Adaui  Bede. 
The  best  constructed  part  of  David  Copperjicld  \s,  however,  unmis- 
takably the  story  of  Little  Emily  and  her  kinsfolk.  This  is  most 
skilfully  interwoven  with  the  personal  experiences  of  David,  of 
which  —  except  in  its  very  beginnings  —  it  forms  no  integral  part ; 
and  throughout  the  reader  is  haunted  by  a  presentiment  of  the 
coming  catastrophe,  though  unable  to  divine  the  tragic  force  and 
justice  of  its  actual  accomplishment.  A  touch  altered  here  and  there 
in  Steerforth,  with  the  Rosa  Dartle  episode  excluded  or  greatly  re- 
duced, and  this  part  of  David  Copperjield  might  challenge  compari- 
son as  to  workmanship  with  the  whole  literature  of  modern  fiction. 

Of  the  idyl  of  Davy  and  Dora  what  shall  I  say?  Its  earliest 
stages  are  full  of  the  gayest  comedy.  What,  for  instance,  could 
surpass  the  history  of  the  picnic  —  where  was  it?  perhaps  it  was 
near  Guildford.  At  that  feast  an  imaginary  rival,  Red  Whisker," 
made  the  salad  —  how  could  they  eat  it  ?  —  and  **  voted  himself  into 
the  charge  of  the  wine-cellar,  which  he  constructed,  being  an  inge- 
nious beasts  in  the  hollow  trunk  of  a  tree."  Better  still  are  the 
backward  ripples  in  the  course  of  true  love ;  best  of  all  the  deep 
wisdom  of  Miss  Mills,  in  whose  nature  mental  trial  and  suffering 
supplied,  in  some  measure,  the  place  of  years.  In  the  narrative  of 
the  young  housekeeping  David's  real  trouble  is  most  skilfully  min- 
gled with  the  comic  woes  of  the  situation  ;  and  thus  the  idyl  almost 
imperceptibly  passes  into  the  last  phase,  where  the  clouds  dissolve 
in  a  rain  of  tears.  The  genius  which  conceived  and  executed  these 
closing  scenes  was  touched  by  a  pity  towards  the  fictitious  crea- 
tures of  his  own  imagination,  which  melted  his  own  heart ;  and 
thus  his  pathos  is  here  irresistible. 

The  inventive  power  of  Dickens  in  none  of  his  other  books  in- 
dulged itself  so  abundantly  in  the  creation  of  eccentric  characters  ; 
but  neither  w^as  it  in  any  so  admirably  tempered  by  taste  and  feel- 
ing. It  contains  no  character  which  could  strictly  be  called  gro- 
tesque, unless  it  be  little  Miss  Mowcher.  Most  of  her  outward 
peculiarities  Dickens  had  copied  from  a  living  original ;  but  receiv- 
ing a  remonstrance  from  the  latter,  he  good-humouredly  altered  the 
use  he  had  intended  to  make  of  the  character,  and  thereby  spoiled 
what  there  was  in  it  —  not  much,  in  my  opinion — to  spoil.  Mr. 


68 


DICKENS. 


Dick  belongs  to  a  species  of  eccentric  personages  —  mad  people,  in 
a  word  —  for  which  Dickens  as  a  writer  had  a  curious  liking ;  but 
though  there  is  consequently  no  true  humour  in  this  character,  it 
helps  to  bring  out  the  latent  tenderness  in  another.  David^s  Aunt 
is  a  figure  which  none  but  a  true  humourist  such  as  Sterne  or  Dick- 
ens could  have  drawn,  and  she  must  have  sprung  from  the  author's 
brain  armed  cap-a-pie  as  she  appeared  in  her  garden  before  his  lit- 
tle double.  Yet  even  Miss  Betsey  Trotwood  was  not  altogether  a 
creation  of  the  fancy,  for  at  Broadstairs  the  locality  is  still  pointed 
out  where  the  '*one  great  outrage  of  her  life"  was  daily  renewed. 
In  the  other  chief  characters  of  this  story  the  author  seems  to  rely 
entirely  on  natural  truthfulness.  He  must  have  had  many  oppor- 
tunities of  noting  the  ways  of  seamen  and  fishermen,  but  the  occu- 
pants of  the  old  boat  near  Yarmouth  possess  the  typical  character- 
istics with  which  the  experience  and  the  imagination  of  centuries 
have  agreed  to  credit  the  *'salt"  division  of  mankind.  Again,  he 
had  had  his  own  experience  of  shabby-genteel  life,  and  of  the  strug- 
gle which  he  had  himself  seen  a  happy  and  a  buoyant  temperament 
rnaintaining  against  a  sea  of  trouble.  But  Mr.  Micawber,  whatever 
features  may  have  been  transferred  to  him,  is  the  type  of  a  whole 
race  of  men  who  will  not  vanish  from  the  face  of  the  earth  so  long 
as  the  hope  wdiich  lives  eternal  in  the  human  breast  is  only  tempo- 
rarily suspended  by  the  laws  of  debtor  and  creditor,  and  is  always 
capable  of  revival  with  the  aid  of  a  bowl  of  milk-punch.  A  kind- 
lier and  a  merrier,  a  more  humorous  and  a  more  genuine  character 
was  never  conceived  than  this  ;  and  if  anything  was  wanted  to  com- 
plete the  comicality  of  the  conception,  it  was  the  wife  of  his  bosom 
v/ith  the  twins  at  her  own,  and  her  mind  made  up  not  to  desert  Mr. 
Micawber.  Delightful  too  in  his  v/ay,  though  of  a  class  more  com- 
mon in  Dickens,  is  Tommy  Traddles,  the  genial  picture  of  whose 
married  life  in  chambers  in  Gray's  Inn,  with  the  dearest  girl  in  the 
world  and  her  five  sisters,  including  the  beauty,  on  a  visit,  may 
have  been  suggested  by  kindly  personal  reminis'cences  of  youthful 
days.  In  contrast  to  these  characters,  the  shambling,  fawning, 
villanous  hypocrisy  of  Uriah  Heep  is  a  piece  of  intense  and  elabo- 
rate workmanship,  almost  cruelly  done  without  being  overdone.  It 
was  in  his  figures  of  hypocrites  that  Dickens's  satirical  power  most 
diversely  displayed  itself ;  and  by  the  side  of  Urjah  Heep  in  this 
story,  literally  so  in  the  prison-scene  at  the  close,  stands  another 
species  of  the  race,  the  valet  Littimer,  a  sketch  which  Thackeray 
himself  could  not  have  surpassed. 

Thus,  then,  I  must  leave  the  book,  with  its  wealth  of  pathos  and 
humour,  with  the  glow  of  youth  still  tinging  its  pages,  but  with  the 
gentler  mood  of  manhood  pervading  it  from  first  to  last.  The  real- 
ity of  David  Copperfield  is,  perhaps,  the  first  feature  in  it  likely  to 
strike  the  reader  new  to  its  charms ;  but  a  closer  acquaintance  will 
produce,  and  familiarity  will  enhance,  the  sense  of  its  wonderful  art. 
Nothing  will  ever  destroy  the  popularity  of  a  work  of  which  it  can 
truly  be  said  that,  while  offering  to  his  muse  a  gift  not  less  beautiful 
than  precious,  its  author  put  into  it  his  life's  blood. 


DICKENS, 


69 


CHAPTER  V. 

CHANGES. 
[1852-1858.] 

I  HAVE  spoken  of  both  the  intellectual  and  the  physical  vigour  of 
Charles  Dickens  as  at  their  height  in  the  years  of  which  the  most 
enduring  fruit  was  the  most  delightful  of  all  his  fictions.  But  there 
was  no  break  in  his  activity  after  the  achievement  of  this  or  any 
other  of  his  literary  successes,  and  he  was  never  harder  at  work 
than  during  the  seven  years  of  which  I  am  about  to  speak,  although 
in  this  period  also  occasionally  he  was  to  be  found  hard  at  play.  Its 
beginning  saw  him  settled  in  his  new  and  cheerfully  furnished 
abode  at  Tavistock  House,  of  which  he  had  taken  possession  in 
October,  1 85 1.  At  its  close  he  was  master  of  the  country  residence 
which  had  been  the  dream  of  his  childhood,  but  he  had  become  a 
stranger  to  that  tranquillity  of  mind  without  which  no  man's  house 
is  truly  his  home.  Gradually,  but  surely,  things  had  then,  or  a 
little  before,  come  to  such  a  pass  that  he  wrote  to  his  faithful 
friend:  am  become  incapable  of  rest.  I  am  quite  confident  I 
should  rust,  break,  and  die,  if  I  spared  myself.  Much  better  to 
die,  doing.  What  I  am  in  that  way  Nature  made  me  first,  and  my 
way  of  life  has  of  late,  alas!  confirmed."  Early  in  1852  the  young- 
est of  his  children  had  been  born  to  him  —  the  boy  whose  babyhood 
once  more  revived  in  him  a  tenderness  the  depth  of  which  no  ec- 
centric humours  and  fantastic  sobriquets  could  conceal.  In  May, 
1858,  he  had  separated  from  the  mother  of  his  children;  and, 
though  self-sacrificing  affection  was  at  hand  to  watch  over  them 
and  him,  yet  that  domestic  life  of  which  he  had  become  the  prophet 
and  poet  to  hundreds  of  thousands  was  in  its  fairest  and  fullest  form 
at  an  end  for  himself. 

In  the  earlier  of  these  years  Dickens's  movements  were  still  very 
much  of  the  same  kind,  and  varied  much  after  the  same  fashion,  as 
in  the  period  described  in  my  last  chapter.  In  1852  the  series  of 
amateur  performances  in  the  country  was  completed  ;  but  time  was 
found  for  a  summer  residence  in  Camden  Crescent,  Dover.  Dur- 
ing his  stay  there,  and  during  most  of  his  working  hours  in  this 
and  the  following  year  —  the  spring  of  which  was  partly  spent 
at  Brighton  —  he  was  engaged  upon  his  new  story.  Bleak  House ^ 
published  in  numbers  dating  from  March,  1852,  to  September, 
1853.    '*To  let  you  into  a  secret,''  he  had  written  to  his  lively 


70 


DICKENS, 


friend,  Miss  Mary  Boyle,  from  Dover,  I  am  not  quite  sure  that 
1  ever  did  like,  or  ever  shall  like,  anything  quite  so  well  as  Copper- 
field.  But  I  foresee,  I  think,  some  very  good  things  in  Bleak 
Housed  There  is  no  reason  to  believe  that,  by  the  general  public, 
this  novel  was  at  the  time  of  its  publication  a  whit  less  favourably 
judged  or  less  eagerly  read  than  its  predecessor.  According  to  the 
authors  own  testimony,  it  "took  extraordinarily,  especially  during 
the  last  five  or  six  months  ^'  of  its  issue,  and  *'  retained  its  immense 
circulation  from  the  first,  beating  dear  old  Copperjield  by  a  round 
ten  thousand  or  more."  To  this  day  the  book  has  its  staunch 
friends,  some  of  whom  would  perhaps  be  slow  to  confess  by  which 
of  the  elements  in  the  story  they  are  most  forcibly  attracted.  On  the 
other  hand,  Bleak  House  was  probably  the  first  of  Dickens's  works 
which  furnished  a  suitable  text  to  a  class  of  censors  whose  precious 
balms  have  since  descended  upon  his  head  with  constant  reitera- 
tion.    The  power  of  amusing  being  graciously  conceded  to  the 

man  of  genius,"  his  book  was  charged  with  absolute  want  of 
construction,"  and  with  being  a  heterogeneous  compound  made  up 
of  a  meagre  and  melodramatic  story,  and  a  number  of  "odd  folks 
that  have  to  do  with  a  long  Chancery  suit.""  Of  the  characters 
themselves  it  was  asserted  that,  though  in  the  main  excessively 
funny,  they  were  more  like  caricatures  of  the  stage  than  studies 
from  nature.  Some  approval  was  bestowed  upon  particular  figures, 
but  rather  as  types  of  the  influence  of  externals  than  as  real  indi- 
vidualities ;  and  while  the  character  of  the  poor  crossing-sweeper 
v.as  generously  praised,  it  was  regretted  that  Dickens  should  never 
have  succeeded  in  drawing  "  a  man  or  woman  whose  lot  is  cast 
among  the  high-born  or  wealthy."    He  belonged,  unfortunately, 

in  literature  to  the  same  class  as  his  illustrator,  Hablot  Browne,  in 
design,  though  he  far  surpasses  the  illustrator  in  range  and  power." 
In  other  words,  he  was  essentially  a  caricaturist. 

As  applied  to  Bleak  House,  with  which  I  am  at  present  alone 
concerned,  this  kind  of  censure  was  in  more  ways  than  one  unjust. 
So  far  as  constructive  skill  was  concerned,  the  praise  given  by  For- 
ster  to  Bleak  House  may  be  considered  excessive  ;  but  there  can  be  no 
doubt  that,  as  compared,  not  with  Pickwick  and  AUckleby^  but  with 
its  immediate  predecessor,  David  Coppejfield,  this  novel  exhibits  a 
decided  advance  in  that  respect.  In  truth,  Dickens  in  Bleak  Hoiise 
for  the  first  time  emancipated  himself  from  that  form  of  novel  which, 
in  accordance  with  his  great  eighteenth-century  favourites  he  had 
hitherto  more  or  less  consciously  adopted  —  the  novel  of  adventure, 
of  which  the  person  of  the  hero,  rather  than  the  machinery  of  the 
plot,  forms  the  connecting  element.  It  may  be  that  the  influence 
of  Mr.  Wilkie  Collins  was  already  strong  upon  him,  and  that  the 
younger  writer,  whom  Dickens  v/as  about  this  time  praising  for  his 
unlikeness  to  the  "  conceited  idiots  who  suppose  that  volumes  are  to 
be  tossed  off  like  pancakes,"  was  already  teaching  something  to,  as 
v/ell  as  learning  something  from,  the  elder.  It  may  also  be  that  the 
criticism  which  as  editor  of  Household  Words  Dickens  was  now  in 
the  habit  of  judiciously  applying  to  the  fictions  of  others,  uncon- 


DICKENS. 


71 


sciously  affected  his  own  methods  and  processes.  Certain  it  is 
that  from  this  point  of  view  Bleak  House  may  be  said  to  Ijegin  a 
new  series  among  his  works  of  fiction.  The  great  Chancery  suit 
and  the  fortunes  of  those  concerned  in  it  are  not  a  disconnected 
background  from  which  the  mystery  of  Lady  Dedlock's  secret 
stands  forth  in  relief ;  but  the  two  main  parts  of  the  story  are  skil- 
fully interwoven  as  in  a  Spanish  double-plot.  Nor  is  the  success  of 
the  general  action  materially  affected  by  the  circumstance  that  the 
tone  of  Esther  Summerson's  diary  is  not  altogether  true.  At  the 
same  time  there  is  indisputably  some  unevenness  in  the  construction 
of  Bleak  House.  It  drags,  and  drags  very  perceptibly,  in  some  of  its 
earlier  parts.  On  the  other  hand,  the  interest  of  the  reader  is  strongly 
revived  when  that  popular  favourite,  Mr.  Inspector  Bucket,  appears 
on  the  scene,  and  when,  more  especially  in  the  admirably  vivid 
narrative  of  Esther's  journey  with  the  detective,  the  nearness  of  tlie 
catastrophe  exercises  its  exciting  influence.  Some  of  the  machin- 
ery, moreover  —  such  as  the  Smallweed  family's  part  in  the  plot 
—  is  tiresome ;  and  particular  incidents  are  intolerably  horrible  or 
absurd  —  such  as  on  the  one  hand  the  spontaneous  combustion 
(which  is  proved  possible  by  the  analogy  of  historical  facts!),  and 
on  the  other  the  intrusion  of  the  oil-grinding  Mr.  Chadband  into 
the  solemn  presence  of  Sir  Leicester  Dedlock's  grief.  But  in  gen- 
eral the  parts  of  the  narrative  are  well  knit  together ;  and  there  is  a 
subtle  skill  in  the  way  in  which  the  two  main  parts  of  the  story 
converge  towards  their  common  close. 

The  idea  of  making  an  impersonal  object  like  a  great  Chan- 
cery suit  the  centre  round  which  a  large  and  manifold  group 
of  characters  revolves,  seems  to  savour  of  a  drama  rather  than 
of  a  story.  No  doubt  the  theme  suggested  itself  to  Dickens 
with  a  very  real  purpose,  and  on  the  basis  of  facts  which  he 
might  well  think  warranted  him  in  his  treatment  of  it ;  for,  true 
artist  though  he  was,  the  thought  of  exposing  some  national  de- 
fect, of  helping  to  bring  about  some  real  reform,  was  always 
paramount  in  his  mind  over  any  mere  literary  conception.  P?'i7;id 
facie,  at  least,  and  with  all  due  deference  to  Chancery  judges  and 
eminent  silk  gowns  like  Mr.  Blowers,  the  length  of  Chancery 
suits  was  a  real  public  grievance,  as  well  as  a  frequent  private 
calamity.  But  even  as  a  mere  artistic  notion  the  idea  of  Jarn- 
dyce  V,  Jarndyce  as  diversely  affecting  those  who  lived  by  it, 
those  who  rebelled  against  it,  those  who  died  of  it,  was,  in  its 
way,  of  unique  force ;  and  while  Dickens  never  brouglit  to  any 
other  of  his  subjects  so  useful  a  knowledge  of  its  external  de- 
tails—  in  times  gone  by  he  had  served  a  Kenge  and  Carboys" 
of  his  own  —  hardly  any  one  of  those  subjects  suggested  so  wide  a 
variety  of  aspects  for  characteristic  treatment. 

For  never  before  had  his  versatility  in  drawing  character  filled 
his  canvas  with  so  multitudinous  and  so  various  a  host  of  per- 
sonages. The  legal  profession,  with  its  servitors  and  hangers-on 
of  every  degree,  occupies  the  centre  of  the  picture.  In  this  group 
no  figure  is  more  deserving  of  admiration  than  that  of  Mr. 


72 


DICKENS. 


Tulkinghorn,  the  eminently  respectable  family  solicitor,  af  whose 
very  funeral,  by  a  four-wheeled  affliction,  the  good-will  of  the 
aristocracy  manifests  itself.  We  learn  very  little  about  him, 
and  probably  care  less ;  but  he  interests  us  precisely  as  we 
should  be  interested  by  the  real  old  family  lawyer,  about  whom 
we  might  know  and  care  equally  little,  were  we  to  find  him 
alone  in  the  twilight,  drinking  his  ancient  port  in  his  frescoed 
chamber  in  those  fields  where  the  shepherds  play  on  Chancery 
pipes  that  have  no  stop.  (Mr.  Forster,  by-the-way,  omitted  to 
point  out  to  his  readers,  what  the  piety  of  American  research 
has  since  put  on  record,  that  Mr.  Tulkinghorn's  house  was  a 
picture  of  the  biographer's  own  residence.)  The  portrait  of  Mr. 
Vholes,  who  supports  an  unassailable  but  unenviable  professional 
reputation  for  the  sake  of  the  three  dear  girls  at  home,"  and 
a  father  whom  he  has  to  support  "in  the  Vale  of  Taunton,"  is 
less  attractive ;  but  nothing  could  be  more  in  its  place  in  the  story 
than  the  clammy  tenacity  of  this  legal  ghoul  and  his  dead  glove." 
Lower  down  in  the  great  system  of  the  law  we  come  upon  Mr. 
Guppy  and  his  fellows,  the  very  quintessence  of  cockney  vulgar- 
ity, seasoned  with  a  flavour  of  legal  sharpness  without  which 
the  rankness  of  the  mixture  would  be  incomplete.  To  the  legal 
group  Miss  Flite,  whose  original,  if  I  remember  right,  used  to 
haunt  the  Temple  as  v/ell  as  the  precincts  of  the  Chancery  courts, 
may  likewise  be  said  to  belong.  She  is  quite  legitimately  intro- 
duced into  the  story —  which  cannot  be  said  of  all  Dickens's  mad- 
men—  because  her  madness  associates  itself  with  its  main  theme. 

Much  admiration  has  been  bestowed  upon  the  figures  of  an 
eccentric  by  or  under  plot  in  this  story,  in  v/hich  the  family  of 
the  Jellybys  and  the  august  Mr.  Turveydrop  are,  actively,  or  by 
passive  endurance,  engaged.  The  philanthropic  section  of  le 
mvjide  oil  l'o7i  s'eniiiiie  has  never  been  satirised  more  tellingly, 
and,  it  must  be  added,  more  bitterly.  Perhaps  at  the  time  of 
the  publication  of  Bleak  House  the  activity  of  our  Mrs.  Jellybys 
took  a  wider  and  more  cosmopolitan  sweep  than  in  later  days ; 
for  we  read  at  the  end  of  Esther's  diary  how  Mrs.  Jellyby  *'has 
been  disappointed  in  Borrioboola  Gha,  which  turned  out  a  fail- 
ure in  consequence  of  the  King  of  Borrioboola  wanting  to  sell 
everybody  —  who  survived  the  climate  —  for  rum ;  but  she  has 
taken  up  with  the  rights  of  women  to  sit  in  Parliament,  and 
Caddy  tells  me  it  is  a  mission  involving  more  correspondence 
than  the  old  one."  But  Mrs.  Jellyby's  interference  in  the  affairs 
of  other  people  is  after  all  hurtful  only  because  in  busying  her- 
self with  theirs  she  forgets  her  own.  The  truly  offensive  bene- 
factress of  her  fellow-creatures  is  Mrs.  Pardiggle,  who,  maxim 
in  mouth  and  tract  in  hand,  turns  everything  she  approaches  to 
stone.  Among  her  victims  are  her  own  children,  including  Alfred, 
aged  five,  who  has  been  induced  to  take  an  oath  **  never  to  use 
tobacco  in  any  form." 

The  particular  vein  of  feeling  that  led  Dickens  to  the  delineation 
of  these  satirical  figures  was  one  which  never  ran  dry  with  him, 


DICKENS. 


73 


and  which  suggested  some  forcible-feeble  satire  in  his  very  last 
fiction.  I  call  it  a  vein  of  feeling  only;  for  he  could  hardly 
have  argued  in  cold  blood  that  the  efforts  which  he  ridicules 
were  not  misrepresented  as  a  whole  by  his  satire.  When  poor 
Jo  on  his  death-bed  is  asked  whether  he  ever  knew  a  prayer/' 
and  replies  that  he  could  never  make  anything  out  of  those  spoken 
by  the  gentlemen  who  came  down  Tom-all-Alone's  a-prayin',*' 
but  who  mostly  sed  as  the  t'other  wuns  prayed  wrong,"  the 
author  brings  a  charge  which  he  might  not  have  found  it  easy 
to  substantiate.  Yet  —  with  the  exception  of  such  isolated  pas- 
sages—  the  figure  of  Jo  is  in  truth  one  of  the  most  powerful 
protests  that  have  been  put  forward  on  behalf  of  the  friendless 
outcasts  of  our  streets.  Npr  did  the  romantic  element  in  the 
conception  interfere  with  the  effect  of  the  realistic.  If  Jo,  who 
seems  at  first  to  have  been  intended  to  be  one  of  the  main  fig- 
ures of  the  story,  is  in  Dickens's  best  pathetic  manner,  the  Bagnet 
family  is  in  his  happiest  vein  of  quiet  humour.  Mr.  Inspector 
Bucket,  though  not  altogether  free  from  mannerism,  well  de- 
serves the  popularity  which  he  obtained.  For  this  character, 
as  the  pages  of  Hoiisehold  Words  testify,  Dickens  had  made 
many  studies  in  real  life.  The  detective  police-officer  had  at  that 
time  not  yet  become  a  standing  figure  of  fiction  and  the  drama, 
nor  had  the  detective  of  real  life  begun  to  destroy  the  illusion. 

Bleak  House  was  least  of  all  among  the  novels  hitherto  published 
by  its  author  obnoxious  to  the  charge  persistently  brought  against 
him,  that  he  was  doomed  to  failure  in  his  attempts  to  draw  charac- 
ters taken  from  any  but  the  lower  spheres  of  life  —  in  his  attempts, 
in  short,  to  draw  ladies  and  gentlemen.  To  begin  with,  one  of  the 
most  interesting  characters  in  the  book  —  indeed,  in  its  relation  to 
the  main  idea  of  the  story,  the  most  interesting  of  all  —  is  the 
youthful  hero,  if  he  is  to  be  so  called,  Richard  Carson.  From  the 
very  nature  of  the  conception  the  character  is  passive  only ;  but  the 
art  and  feeling  are  in  their  way  unsurpassed  with  which  the  gradual 
collapse  of  a  fine  nature  is  here  exhibited.  Sir  Leicester  Dedlock, 
in  some  measure  intended  as  a  type  of  his  class,  has  been  con- 
demned as  wooden  and  unnatural ;  and  no  doubt  the  machinery  of 
that  part  of  the  story  in  which  he  is  concerned  creaks  before  it  gets 
under  way.  On  the  other  hand,  after  the  catastrophe  has  over- 
whelmed him  and  his  house,  he  becomes  a  really  fine  picture,  un- 
marred  by  any  Grandisonianisms  in  either  thought  or  phrase,  of  a 
true  gentleman,  bowed  but  not  warped  by  distress.  Sir  Leicester's 
relatives,  both  dead  and  living ;  Volumnia's  sprightly  ancestress  on 
the  wall,  and  that  *'fair  Dedlock"  herself;  the  whole  cousinhood, 
debilitated  and  otherwise,  but  of  one  mind  on  such  points  as  Wil- 
liam Buffy's  blameworthy  neglect  of  his  duty  u>he?i  iii  office ;  all 
these  make  up  a  very  probable  picture  of  a  house  great  enough  — 
or  thinking  itself  great  enough  —  to  look  at  the  affairs  of  the  world 
from  the  family  point  of  view.  In  Lady  Dedlock  alone  a  failure 
must  be  admitted ;  but  she,  with  her  wicked  double,  the  uncanny 
French  maid  Hortense,  exists  only  for  the  sake  of  the  plot. 


74 


DICKENS. 


With  all  its  merits,  Bleak  House  has  little  of  that  charm  which 
belongs  to  so  many  of  Dickens's  earlier  stories,  and  to  David  Cop- 
perfield  above  all.  In  part,  at  least,  this  may  be  due  to  the  exces- 
sive severity  of  the  task  which  Dickens  had  set  himself  in  Bleak 
Hoiise ;  for  hardly  any  other  of  his  works  is  constructed  on  so  large 
a  scale,  or  contains  so  many  characters  organically  connected  with 
the  progress  of  its  plot ;  and  in  part,  again,  to  the  half-didactic, 
half-satirical  purport  of  the  story,  which  weighs  heavily  on  the 
writer.  An  overstrained  tone  announces  itself  on  the  very  first 
page;  an  opening  full  of  power — indeed,  of  genius  —  but  pitched 
in  a  key  which  we  feel  at  once  will  not,  without  effort,  be  main- 
tained. On  the  second  page  the  prose  has  actually  become  verse ; 
or  how  else  can  one  describe  part  of  the  following  apostrophe  ? 

"  '  This  is  the  Court  of  Chancery,  which  has  its  decaying  houses  and  its 
blighted  lands  in  every  shire  ;  which  has  its  worn-out  kmatic  in  every  mad-house, 
and  its  dead  in  every  church-yard ;  which  has  its  ruined  suitor,  with  his  shpshod 
heels  and  threadbare  dress,  borrowing  and  begging  through  the  round  of  every 
man's  acquaintance  ;  which  gives  to  moneyed  might  the  means  abundantly  of 
wearing  out  the  right ;  which  so  exhausts  finances,  patience,  courage,  hope  ;  so 
overthrows  the  brain  and  breaks  the  heart,  that  there  is  not  an  honourable  man 
among  its  practitioners  who  would  not  give  —  who  does  not  often  give  —  the 
warning,  "  Suffer  any  wrong  that  can  be  done  you,  rather  than  come  here  !  "  '  " 

!t  was  possibly  with  some  thought  of  giving  to  Bleak  Ho2ise  also, 
though  in  a  different  way,  the  close  relation  to  his  experiences  of 
living  men  to  which  David  Copperfield  had  owed  so  much,  that 
Dickens  introduced  into  it  two  portraits.  Doubtless,  at  first,  his 
intention  had  by  no  means  gone  so  far  as  this.  His  constant  coun- 
sellor always  disliked  his  mixing  up  in  his  fictitious  characters  any 
personal  reminiscences  of  particular  men,  experience  having  shown 
that  in  such  cases  the  whole  character  came  out  more  like  than  the 
author  was  aware.  Nor  can  Dickens  himself  have  failed  to  under- 
stand how  such  an  experiment  is  always  tempting,  and  always  dan- 
gerous ;  how  it  is  often  irreconcilable  with  good  feeling,  and  quite 
as  often  with  good  taste.  In  Bleak  House ^  however,  it  occurred  to 
him  to  introduce  likenesses  of  two  living  men,  both  more  or  less 
well  known  to  the  public  and  to  himself ;  and  both  of  individualities 
too  clearly  marked  for  a  portrait,  or  even  a  caricature,  of  either  to 
be  easily  mistaken.  Of  that  art  of  mystification  which  the  authors 
of  both  English  and  French  ro?nansaclef\i2iWQ  since  practised  with 
so  much  transient  success,  he  was  no  master,  and  fortunately  so ; 
for  what  could  be  more  ridiculous  than  that  the  reader^s  interest  in 
a  character  should  be  stimulated,  first,  by  its  being  evidently  the 

the  late  Lord  P-lm-rst-n  or  the  P         of  O  ,  and  then  by  its 

being  no  less  evidently  somebody  else?  It  should  be  added  that 
neither  of  the  two  portrait  characters  in  Bleak  House  possesses  the 
least  importance  for  the  conduct  of  the  story,  so  that  there  is  noth- 
ing to  justify  their  introduction  except  whatever  excellence  may 
belong  to  them  in  themselves. 

Lawrence  Boythorn  is  described  by  Mr.  Sidney  Colvin  as  drawn 


DICKENS. 


75 


from  Walter  Savage  Landor  with  his  intellectual  greatness  left  out. 
It  was,  of  course,  unlikely  that  his  intellectual  greatness  should  be 
left  in,  the  intention  obviously  being  to  reproduce  what  was  eccen- 
tric in  the  ways  and  manner,  with  a  suggestion  of  what  was  noble 
in  the  character,  of  Dickens's  famous  friend.  Whether,  had  he 
attempted  to  do  so,  Dickens  could  have  drawn  a  picture  of  the 
whole  Landor,  is  another  question.  Landor,  who  could  put  into  a 
classic  dialogue  that  sense  of  the  7idif\o  which  Dickens  is  generally 
a  stranger,  yet  passionately  admired  the  most  sentimeiital  of  all  his 
young  friend's  poetic  figures  ;  and  it  might  almost  be  said  that  the 
intellectual  natures  of  the  two  men  were  drawn  together  by  the  force 
of  contrast.  They  appear  to  have  first  become  intimate  with  one 
another  during  Landor's  residence  at  Bath  —  which  began  in  1837 
—  and  they  frequently  met  at  Gore  House.  At  a  celebration  of  the 
poet's  birthday  in  his  lodgings  at  Bath,  so  Forster  tells  us  in  his 
biography  of  Landor,  the  fancy  which  took  the  form  of  Little  Nell 
in  the  Cm'iosity  Shop  first  dawned  on  the  genius  of  its  creator." 
In  Landor's  spacious  mind  there  was  room  for  cordial  admiration  of 
an  author  the  bent  of  whose  genius  differed  widely  from  that  of  his 
own ;  and  he  could  thus  afford  to  sympathise  with  his  whole  heart 
in  a  creation  which  men  of  much  smaller  intellectual  build  have  pro- 
nounced mawkish  and  unreal.  Dickens  afterwards  gave  to  one  of 
his  sons  the  names  of  Walter  Landor ;  and  when  the  old  man  died 
at  last,  afier  his  godson,  paid  him  an  eloquent  tribute  of  respect  in 
All  the  Yem'  RoJiitd.  In  this  paper  the  personal  intention  of  the 
character  of  Boy  thorn  is  avowed  by  implication ;  but  though  Lan- 
dor esteemed  and  loved  Dickens,  it  might  seem  matter  for  wonder, 
did  not  eccentrics  after  all  sometimes  cherish  their  own  eccen- 
tricity, that  his  irascible  nature  failed  to  resent  a  rather  doubtful 
compliment.  For  the  character  of  Boythorn  is  whimsical  rather 
than,  in  any  but  the  earlier  sense  of  the  word,  humorous.  But 
the  portrait,  however  imperfect,  was  in  this  instance,  beyond  all 
doubt,  both  kindly  meant  and  kindly  taken ;  though  it  cannot  be 
Slid  to  have  added  to  the  attractions  of  the  book  into  which  it  is 
introduced. 

While  no  doubt  ever  existed  as  to  this  likeness,  the  case  may  not 
seem  so  clear  with  regard  to  the  original  of  Harold  Skimpole.  It 
would  be  far  more  pleasant  to  pass  by  without  notice  the  contro- 
versy —  if  controversy  it  can  be  called  —  which  this  character  pro- 
voked ;  but  a  wrong  done  by  one  eminent  man  of  letters  to  another, 
however  unforeseen  its  extent  may  have  been,  and  however  genuine 
the  endeavour  to  repair  its  effect,  becomes  part  of  literary  history. 
That  the  original  of  Harold  Skimpole  w^as  Leigh  Hunt  cannot  rea- 
sonably be  called  into  question.  This  assertion  by  no  means 
precludes  the  possibility,  or  probability,  that  a  second  original  sug- 
gested certain  features  in  the  portrait."^  Nor  does  it  contradict  the 
substantial  truthfulness  of  Dickens's  own  statement,  published  in 
All  the  Year  Round  after  Leigh  Hunt's  death,  on  the  appear- 
ance of  the  new  edition  of  the  Aiitobioo;raphy  with  Thornton 
Hunt's  admirable  introduction.    While,  Dickens  then  wrote,  he 


76 


DICKENS, 


yielded  to  the  temptation  of  too  often  making  the  character  speak 
like  his  old  friend,"  yet  "  he  no  more  thought,  God  forgive  him  ! 
that  the  admired  original  would  ever  be  charged  with  the  imaginary 
vices  of  the  fictitious  creature,  than  he  had  himself  ever  thought  of 
charging  the  blood  of  Desdemona  and  Othello  on  the  innocent 
Academy  model  who  sat  for  lago's  leg  in  the  picture.  Even  as  to 
the  mere  occasional  manner,^'  he  declared  that  he  had  "  altered 
the  whole  of  that  part  of  the  text,  when  two  intimate  friends  of 
Leigh  Hunt  —  both  still  living  —  discovered  too  strong  a  resem- 
blance to  his  '  way.'  "  But,  while  accepting  this  statement,  and 
suppressing  a  regret  that  after  discovering  the  dangerous  closeness 
of  the  resemblance  Dickens  should  have,  quite  at  the  end  of  the 
story,  introduced  a  satirical  reference  to  Harold  Skimpole's  auto- 
biography —  Leigh  Hunt's  having  been  published  only  a  year  or 
two  before  —  one  must  confess  that  the  explanation  only  helps  to 
prove  the  rashness  of  the  offence.  While  intending  the  portrait  to 
keep  its  own  secret  from  the  general  public,  Dickens  at  the  same 
time  must  have  w^ished  to  gratify  a  few  keen-sighted  friends.  In 
March,  1852,  he  writes  to  Forster,  evidently  in  reference  to  the  ap- 
prehensions of  his  correspondent:  Browne  has  done  Skimpole, 
and  helped  to  make  him  singularly  unlike  the  great  original. The 
"great  original"  was  a  man  for  whom,  both  before  and  after  this 
untoward  incident  in  the  relations  between  them,  Dickens  professed 
a  warm  regard,  and  who,  to  judge  from  the  testimony  of  those  who 
knew  him  well,^  and  from  his  unaffected  narrative  of  his  own  life, 
abundantly  deserved  it.  A  perusal  of  Leigh  Hunt's  Autobiography 
suffices  to  show  that  he  used  to  talk  in  Skimpole's  manner,  and  even 
to  write  in  it ;  that  he  was  at  one  period  of  his  life  altogether  igno- 
rant of  money  matters,  and  that  he  cultivated  cheerfulness  on  prin- 
ciple. But  it  likewise  shows  that  his  ignorance  of  business  was 
acknowledged  by  him  as  a  misfortune  in  which  he  was  very  far 
from  exulting.  "Do  I  boast  of  this  ignorance?"  he  writes. 
"Alas!  I  have  no  such  respect  for  the  pedantry  of  absurdity  as 
that.  I  blush  for  it,  and  I  only  record  it  out  of  a  sheer  painful 
movement  of  conscience,  as  a  warning  to  those  young  authors  who 
might  be  led  to  look  upon  such  folly  as  a  fine  thing,  which  at  all 
events  is  what  I  never  thought  it  myself."  On  the  other  hand,  as  his 
son  showed,  his  cheerfulness,  which  was  not  inconsistent  with  a  nat- 
ural proneness  to  intervals  of  melancholy,  rested  on  grounds  which 
were  the  result  of  a  fine  as  well  as  healthy  morality.  "  The  value  of 
cheerful  opinions,"  he  wrote,  in  words  embodying  a  moral  that 
Dickens  himself  was  never  weary  of  enforcing,  "is  inestimable; 
they  will  retain  a  sort  of  heaven  round  a  man,  when  everything  else 
might  fail  him,  and  consequently  they  ought  to  be  religiously  incul- 
cated upon  his  children."  At  the  same  time,  no  quality  was  more 
conspicuous  in  his  life  than  his  readiness  for  hard  work,  even  under 

^  Among  these  is  Mr.  Alexander  Ireland,  the  author  of  the  Bibliography  of  Leigh 
Hunt  and  Hazlitt,  who  has  kindly  communicated  to  me  part  of  his  collections  concern- 
ing the  former.  The  tittle-tattle  against  Leigh  Hunt  repeated  by  Lord  Macaulay  is,  on 
the  face  of  it,  unworthy  of  notice. 


DICKENS. 


77 


the  most  depressing  circumstances ;  and  no  feature  was  more 
marked  in  his  moral  character  than  his  conscientiousness.  In 
the  midst  of  the  sorest  temptations/^  Dickens  wrote  of  him,  he 
maintained  his  honesty  unblemished  by  a  single  stain  ;  and  in  all 
public  and  private  transactions  he  was  the  very  soul  of  truth  and 
honour."  To  mix  up  with  the  outward  traits  of  such  a  man  the  de- 
testable obliquities  of  Harold  Skimpole  was  an  experiment  para- 
doxical even  as  a  mere  piece  of  character-drawing.  The  merely 
literary  result  is  a  failure,  while  a  wound  was  needlessly  inflicted,  i*f 
not  upon  Leigh  Hunt  himself,  at  least  upon  all  who  cherished  his 
friendship  or  good  name.  Dickens  seemed  honestly  and  deeply 
to  have  regretted  what  he  had  done,  and  the  extremely  tasteful 
little  tribute  to  hevyh  Hunt*s  poetic  gifts  which,  some  years  before 
the  death  of  the  latter,  Dickens  wrote  for  Household  Words^^  must 
have  partaken  of  the  nature  of  an  amende  honorable.  Neither  his 
subsequent  repudiation  of  unfriendly  intentions,  nor  his  earlier 
exertions  on  Leigh  Hunt's  behalf,  are  to  be  overlooked ;  but  they 
cannot  undo  a  mistake  which  forms  an  unfortunate  incident  in 
Dickens's  literary  life,  singularly  free  though  that  life,  as  a  whole,  is 
from  the  miseries  of  personal  quarrels,  and  all  the  pettinesses 
with  which  the  world  of  letters  is  familiar. 

While  Dickens  was  engaged  upon  a  literary  work  such  as  would 
have  absorbed  the  intellectual  energies  of  most  men,  he  not  only 
wrote  occasionally  for  his  journal,  but  also  dictated  for  publication 
in  it,  the  successive  portions  of  a  book  altogether  outside  his  usual 
range  of  authorship.  This  was  A  Child^s  History  of  England^  the 
only  one  of  his  works  that  was  not  written  by  his  own  hand.  A 
history  of  England,  written  by  Charles  Dickens  for  his  own  or 
any  one  else's  children,  was  sure  to  be  a  different  work  from  one 
written  under  similar  circumstances  by  Mr.  Freeman  or  the  late 
M.  Guizot.  The  book,  though  it  cannot  be  called  a  success,  is, 
however,  by  no  means  devoid  of  interest.  Just  ten  years  earlier  he 
had  written,  and  printed,  a  history  of  England  for  the  benefit  of 
his  eldest  son,  then  a  hopeful  student  of  the  age  of  five,  which  was 
composed,  as  he  informed  Douglas  Jerrold  at  the  time,  *'in  the 
exact  spirit"  of  that  advanced  politician's  paper,  *'for  I  don't  know 
what  I  should  do  if  he  were  to  get  hold  of  any  Conservative  or  High 
Church  notions ;  and  the  best  way  of  guarding  against  any  such 
horrible  result  is,  I  take  it,  to  wring  the  parrots'  necks  in  his  very 
cradle."  The  ChiWs  History  of  England  is  written  in  the  same 
spirit,  and  illustrates  more  directly,  and,  it  must  be  added,  more 
coarsely,  than  any  of  Dickens's  other  works  his  hatred  of  ecclesias- 
ticism  of  all  kinds.  Thus,  the  account  of  Dunstan  is  pervaded  by 
a  prejudice  which  is  the  fruit  of  anything  but  knowled^re ;  Edward 
the  Confessor  is  the  dreary  old  "  and  the  maudlin  Confessor :  " 
and  the  Pope  and  what  belongs  to  him  are  treated  with  a  measure 
of  contumely  which  would  have  satisfied  the  heart  of  Leigh  Hunt 
himself.    To  be  sure,  if  King  John  is  dismissed  as  a  "  miserable 

^  By  Rail  to  Parnassus,  June  i6,  1855. 


78 


DICKENS. 


brute,''  King  Henry  the  Eighth  is  not  more  courteously  designated 
as  a  blot  of  blood  and  grease  upon  the  history  of  England."  On 
the  other  hand,  it  could  hardly  be  but  that  certain  passages  of  the 
national  story  should  be  well  told  by  so  great  a  master  of  narrative  ; 
and  though  the  strain  in  which  parts  of  the  history  of  Charles  the 
Second  are  recounted  strikes  one  as  hardly  suitable  to  the  young, 
to  whom  irony  is  in  general  caviare  indeed,  yet  there  are  touches 
both  in  the  story  of  this  merry  gentleman  "  —  a  designation  which 
almost  recalls  Fagin  —  and  elsewhere  in  the  book  not  unworthy  of 
its  author.  Its  patriotic  spirit  is  quite  as  striking  as  its  Radicalism  ; 
and  vulgar  as  some  of  its  expressions  must  be  called,  there  is  a 
pleasing  glow  in  the  passage  on  King  Alfred,  which  declares  the 

English-Saxon  "  character  to  have  been  the  greatest  character 
among  the  nations  of  the  earth ;  "  and  there  is  a  yet  nobler  enthusi- 
asm, such  as  it  would  indeed  be  worth  any  writer's  while  to  infuse 
into  the  young,  in  the  passionate  earnestness  with  which,  by  means 
of  the  story  of  Agincourt,  the  truth  is  enforced  that  nothing  can 
make  war  otherwise  than  horrible." 

This  book  must  have  been  dictated,  and  some  at  least  of  the 
latter  portion  of  Bleak  Honse  written,  at  Boulogne,  where,  after  a 
spring  sojourn  at  Brighton,  Dickens  spent  the  summer  of  1853,  and 
where  were  also  passed  the  summers  of  1854  and  1856.  Boulogne, 
where  Le  Sage's  last  years  were  spent,  was  Ou?'  French  Watering' 
place,  so  graphically  described  in  a  paper  in  Household  Words  as  a 
companion  picture  to  the  old  familiar  Broadstairs.  The  family 
were  comfortably  settled  on  a  green  hill-side  close  to  the  town,  "  in 
a  charming  garden  in  a  very  pleasant  country,"  with  excellent 
light  wines  on  the  premises,  French  cookery,  millions  of  roses,  two 
cows  —  for  milk-punch  —  vegetables  cut  for  the  pot,  and  handed  in 
at  the  kitchen  window ;  five  summer-houses,  fifteen  fountains  — 
with  no  water  in  'em  —  and  thirty-seven  clocks  —  keeping,  as  I  con- 
ceive, Australian  time,  having  no  reference  whatever  to  the  hours 
on  this  side  of  the  globe."  The  energetic  owner  of  the  Villa  des 
Moulineaux  was  the  M.  Loyal  Devasseur"  of  Our  French  Water- 
ing-place—  jovial,  convivial,  genial,  sentimental  too  as  a  Buona- 
partist  and  a  patriot.  In  1854  the  same  obliging  personage  housed 
the  Dickens  family  in  another  abode,  at  the  top  of  the  hill,  close  to 
the  famous  Napoleonic  column;  but  in  1856  they  came  back  to  tlie 
Moulineaux.  The  former  year  had  been  an  exciting  one  for  Eng- 
lishmen in  France,  with  royal  visits  to  and  fro  to  testify  to  the 
entente  cordiale  between  the  governments.  Dickens,  notwithstand- 
ing his  humorous  assertions,  was  only  moderately  touched  by  the 
Sebastopol  fever;  but  when  a  concrete  problem  came  before  him 
in  the  shape  of  a  festive  demonstration,  he  addressed  himself  to  it 
with  the  irrepressible  ardour  of  the  born  stage-manager.  In  our 
own  proper  illumination,"  he  writes,  on  the  occasion  of  the  Prince 
Consort's  visit  to  the  camp  at  Boulogne,  I  laid  on  all  the  servants, 
all  the  children  now  at  home,  all  the  visitors,  one  to  every  window, 
with  everything  ready  to  light  up  on  the  ringing  of  a  big  dinner- 
bell  by  your  humble  correspondent.  St.  Peter's  on  Easter  Monday 
was  the  result." 


DICKENS. 


79 


Of  course,  at  Boulogne,  Dickens  was  cut  ofT  neither  from  his  busi- 
ness nor  from  his  private  friends.  His  hospitable  invitations  were 
as  urgent  to  his  French  villa  in  the  summer  as  to  his  London  house 
in  the  winter,  and  on  both  sides  of  the  water  the  HouseJiold  Words 
familiars  were  as  sure  of  a  welcome  from  their  chief.  During  his 
absences  from  London  he  could  have  no  trustier  lieutenant  than  Mr. 
W.  H.  Wills,  with  whom,  being  always  ready  to  throw  himself  into  a 
part,  he  corresponded  in  an  amusing  paragraphed,  semi-official  style. 
And  neither  in  his  working  nor  in  his  leisure  hours  had  he  by  this 
time  any  more  cherished  companion  than  Mr.  Wilkie  Collins,  whose 
progress  toward  brilliant  success  he  was  watching  with  the  keenest 
and  kindliest  interest.  With  him  and  his  old  friend  Augustus  Egg, 
Dickens,  in  October,  1853,  started  on  a  tour  to  Switzerland  and 
Italy,  in  the  course  of  which  he  saw  more  than  one  old  friend,  and 
revisited  more  than  one  known  scene  —  ascending  Vesuvius  with 
Mr.  Layard  and  drinking  punch  at  Rome  with  David  Roberts.  It 
would  be  absurd  to  make  any  lofty  demands  upon  the  brief  records 
of  a  holiday  journey;  and,  for  my  part,  I  would  rather  think  of 
Dickens  assiduous  over  his  Christmas  number  at  Rome  and  at 
Venice,  than  weigh  his  moralisings  about  the  electric  telegraph 
running  through  the  Coliseum.  His  letters  written  to  his  wife 
during  this  trip  are  bright  and  gay,  and  it  was  certainly  no  roving 
bachelor  who  **  kissed  almost  all  the  children  he  encountered  in 
remembrance  of  the  sweet  faces  "  of  his  own,  and  **  talked  to  all  the 
mothers  who  carried  them."  By  the  middle  of  December  the  travel- 
lers were  home  again,  and  before  the  year  was  out  he  had  read  to 
large  audiences  at  Birmingham,  on  behalf  of  a  public  institution,  his 
favourite  Christmas  stories  of  The  Christmas  Carol  and  TJie  Cricket 
on  the  Heai'th.  As  yet,  however,  his  mind  was  not  seriously  intent 
upon  any  labours  but  those  proper  to  his  career  as  an  author,  and 
the  year  1854  saw,  between  the  months  of  April  and  August,  the 
publication  in  his  journal  of  a  new  story,  which  is  among  the  most 
characteristic,  though  not  among  the  most  successful,  of  his  works 
of  fiction. 

In  comparison  with  most  of  Dickens^s  novels,  Hard  Times  is  con- 
tained within  a  narrow  compass  ;  and  this,  with  the  further  neces- 
sity of  securing  to  each  successive  small  portion  of  the  story  a  certain 
immediate  degree  of  effectiveness,  accounts,  in  some  measure,  for 
the  peculiarity  of  the  impression  left  by  this  story  upon  many  of  its 
readers.  vShort  as  the  story  relatively  is,  few  of  Dickens's  fictions 
were  elaborated  with  so  much  care.  He  had  not  intended  to  write 
a  new  story  for  a  twelvemonth,  when,  as  he  says,  "  the  idea  laid  hold 
of  him  by  the  throat  in  a  very  violent  manner,"  and  the  labour,  car- 
ried on  under  conditions  of  peculiar  irksomeness,  "used  him  up" 
after  a  quite  unaccustomed  fashion.  The  book  thus  acquired  a  pre- 
cision of  form  and  manner  which  commends  it  to  tiie  French  school 
of  criticism  rather  than  to  lovers  of  English  humour  in  its  ampler 
forms  and  more  flowing  moods.  At  the  same  time  the  work  has  its 
purpose  so  visibly  imprinted  on  its  front,  as  almost  to  forbid  our 
regarding  it  in  the  first  instance  apart  from  the  moral  which  avow- 


80 


DICKENS. 


edly  it  is  intended  to  inculcate.  This  moral,  by  no  means  new  with 
Dickens,  has  both  a  negative  and  a  positive  side.  *'  Do  not  harden 
your  hearts,"  is  the  negative  injunction,  more  especially  do  not 
harden  them  against  the  promptings  of  that  human  kindness  which 
should  draw  together  man  and  man,  old  and  young,  rich  and  poor ; 
and  keep  your  sympathies  fresh  by  bringing  nourishment  to  them 
through  channels  which  prejudice  or  short-sightedness  would  fain 
narrow  or  stop  up.  This  hortatory  purpose  assumes  the  form  of 
invective  and  even  of  angry  menace;  and  "utilitarian  economists, 
skeletons  of  school-masters,  commissioners  of  facts,  genteel  and 
used-up  infidels,  gabblers  of  many  little  dog^s-eared  creeds,"  are 
warned  :  "  The  poor  you  have  always  with  you.  Cultivate  in  them, 
while  there  is  yet  time,  the  utmost  graces  of  the  fancies  and  affec- 
tions, to  adorn  their  lives,  so  much  in  need  of  ornament ;  or,  in  the 
day  of  your  triumph,  when  romance  is  utterly  driven  out  of  their 
souls,  and  they  and  a  bare  existence  stand  face  to  face,  reality  will 
take  a  wolfish  turn,  and  make  an  end  of  you." 

No  authority,  however  eminent,  not  even  Mr.  Ruskin's,  is 
required  to  teach  reflecting  minds  the  infinite  importance  of 
the  principles  which  Hai^d  Times  was  intended  to  illustrate. 
Nor  is  it  of  much  moment  whether  the  illustrations  are  always 
exact;  whether  the  "commissioners  of  facts"  have  reason  to 
protest  that  the  unimaginative  character  of  their  processes  does 
not  necessarily  imply  an  unimaginative  purpose  in  their  ends ; 
whether  there  is  any  actual  Coketown  in  existence  within  a  hun- 
dred miles  of  Manchester;  or  whether  it  suffices  that  "  everybody 
knew  what  was  meant,  but  every  cotton-spinning  town  said  it 
was  the  other  cotton-spinning  town."  The  chief  personal  griev- 
ance of  Stephen  Blackpool  has  been  removed  or  abated,  but 
the  "muddle"  is  not  yet  altogether  cleared  up  which  prevents 
the  nation  and  the  "  national  dustmen,"  its  law-givers,  from  im- 
partially and  sympathetically  furthering  the  interest  of  all  classes. 
In  a  word,  the  moral  of  Hard  Times  has  not  yet  lost  its  force, 
however  imperfect  or  unfair  the  method  may  have  been  in  which 
it  is  urged  in  the  book. 

Unfortunately,  however,  a  work  of  art  with  a  didactic  purpose 
is  only  too  often  prone  to  exaggerate  what  seems  of  special  im- 
portance for  the  purpose  in  question,  and  to  heighten  contrasts 
which  seem  likely  to  put  it  in  the  clearest  light.  "Thomas 
Gradgrind,  sir"  — who  announces  himself  with  something  of  the 
genuine  Lancashire  roll  —  and  his  system  are  a  sound  and  a  laugh- 
able piece  of  satire,  to  begin  with,  only  here  and  there  marred 
by  the  satirist's  imperfect  knowledge  of  the  details  which  he 
caricatures.  The  "Manchester  School,"  which  the  novel  strives 
to  expose,  is  in  itself  to  a  great  extent  a  figment  of  the  imagina- 
tion, which  to  this  day  serves  to  round  many  a  hollow  period 
in  oratory  and  journalism.  Who,  it  may  fairly  be  asked,  were 
the  parliamentary  politicians  satirised  in  the  member  for  Coke- 
town,  deaf  and  blind  to  any  consideration  but  the  multiplication- 
table.^    But  in  any  case  the  cause  hardly  warrants  one  of  its 


DICKENS. 


8i 


consequences  as  depicted  in  the  novel  —  the  utter  brutalisation 
of  a  stolid  nature  like  '*the  Whelp's."  When  Gradgrind's  son 
is  about  to  be  shipped  abroad  out  of  reach  of  the  penalties  of 
his  crime,  he  reminds  his  father  that  he  merely  exemplifies  the 
statistical  law  that  *'so  many  people  out  of  so  many  will  be  dis- 
honest." When  the  virtuous  Bitzer  is  indignantly  asked  whether 
he  has  a  heart,  he  replies  that  he  is  physiologically  assured  of 
the  fact ;  and  to  the  further  inquiry  whether  this  heart  of  his 
is  accessible  to  compassion,  makes  answer  that  **  it  is  accessible 
to  reason,  and  to  nothing  else."  These  returnings  of  Mr.  Grad- 
grind's  philosophy  upon  himself  savour  of  the  moral  justice  rep- 
resented by  Gratiano  in  the  fourth  act.  So,  again,  Coketown, 
with  its  tall  chimneys  and  black  river,  and  its  thirteen  religious 
denominations,  to  which  whoever  else  belonged  the  working- 
men  did  not^  is  no  perverse  contradiction  of  fact.  But  the  in- 
fluence of  Coketown,  or  of  a  whole  wilderness  of  Coketow^ns, 
cannot  justly  be  charged  with  a  tendency  to  ripen  such  a  product 
as  Josicdi  Bounderby,  who  is  not  only  the  bully  of  humanity," 
but  proves  to  be  a  mean-spirited  impostor  in  his  pretensions  to 
the  glory  of  self-help.  In  short.  Hard  Times  errs  by  its  attempt 
to  prove  too  much. 

Apart,  however,  from  the  didactic  purposes  which  overburden  it, 
the  pathos  and  humour  of  particular  portions  of  this  talc  appear  to 
m.e  to  have  been  in  no  wise  overrated.  The  domestic  tragedy  of 
Stephen  and  Rachael  has  a  subdued  intensity  of  tenderness  and 
melancholy  of  a  kind  rare  with  Dickens,  upon  whom  the  example 
of  Mrs.  Gaskell  in  this  instance  may  not  have  been  without  its  in- 
fluence. Nor  is  there  anything  more  delicately  and  at  the  same 
time  more  appropriately  conceived  in  any  of  his  works  than  poor 
Rachael's  dominion  over  the  imagination  as  well  as  over  the  affec- 
tions of  her  noble-minded  and  unfortunate  lover:  As  the  shining 
stars  were  to  the  heavy  candle  in  the  window,  so  was  Rachael,  in 
the  rugged  fancy  of  this  man,  to  the  common  experiences  of  his 
life."  The  love-story  of  poor  Louisa  is  of  a  different  kind,  and 
more  wordy  in  the  telling ;  yet  here  also  the  feelings  painted  are 
natural  and  true.  The  humorous  interest  is  almost  entirely  con- 
centrated upon  the  company  of  horse-riders ;  and  never  has  Dick- 
ens's extraordinary  power  of  humorous  observation  more  genially 
asserted  itself.  From  Mr.  Sleary  —  *'thtout  man,  game-eye"  — 
and  his  protagonist,  Mr.  E.  W.  B.  Childers,  who,  when  he  shook 
his  long  hair,  caused  it  to  shake  all  at  once,"  down  to  Master 
Kidderminster,  who  used  to  form  the  apex  of  the  human  pyramids, 
and  *'in  whose  young  nature  there  was  an  original  flavour  of  the 
misanthrope,"  these  honest  equestrians  are  more  than  worthy  to 
stand  by  the  side  of  Mr.  Vincent  Crummies  and  his  company  of 
actors  ;  and  the  fun  has  here,  in  addition  to  the  grotesqueness  of 
the  earlier  picture,  a  mellow^ness  of  its  own.  Dickens's  comic 
genius  was  never  so  much  at  its  ease  and  so  inexhaustible  in  ludi- 
crous fancies  as  in  the  depiction  of  such  groups  as  this :  and  the 
horse-riders,  skilfully  introduced  to  illustrate  a  truth,  wholesome  if 


82 


DICKENS. 


not  novel,  would  have  insured  popularity  to  a  far  less  interesting  and 
to  a  far  less  powerful  fiction. 

The  year  after  that  which  saw  the  publication  of  Hard  Tz?nes  was 
one  in  which  the  thoughts  of  most  Englishmen  were  turned  away 
from  the  problems  approached  in  that  story.  But  if  the  military 
glories  of  1854  had  not  aroused  in  him  any  very  exuberant  enthu- 
siasm, the  reports  from  the  Crimea  in  the  ensuing  winter  were  more 
likely  to  appeal  to  his  patriotism  as  well  as  to  his  innate  impatience 
of  disorder  and  incompetence.  In  the  first  instance,  however,  he 
contented  himself  with  those  grumblings  to  which,  as  a  sworn  foe 
of  red  tape  and  a  declared  disbeliever  in  our  parliamentary  system, 
he  might  claim  to  have  a  special  right ;  and  he  seems  to  have  been 
too  restless  in  and  about  himself  to  have  entered  very  closely  into 
the  progress  of  public  affairs.  The  Christmas  had  been  a  merry 
one  at  Tavistock  House  ;  and  the  amateur  theatricals  of  its  juvenile 
company  had  passed  through  a  most  successful  season.  Their  his- 
tory has  been  written  by  one  of  the  performers  —  himself  not  the 
least  distinguished  of  the  company,  since  it  was  he  who,  in  Dick- 
ens's house,  caused  Thackeray  to  roll  off  his  seat  in  a  fit  of  laughter. 
Dickens,  who  with  Mark  Lemon  disported  himself  among  these 
precocious  minnows,  was,  as  our  chronicler  relates,  like  Triplet, 
**  author,  manager,  and  actor  too,"  organiser,  deviser,  and  harmo- 
niserof  all  the  incongruous  assembled  elements  ;  it  was  he  "who  im- 
provised costumes,  painted  and  corked  our  innocent  cheeks,  and 
suggested  all  the  most  effective  business  of  the  scene."  But  as  was 
usual  with  him,  the  transition  was  rapid  from  play  to  something  very 
like  earnest ;  and  already,  in  June,  1855,  the  Tavistock  House  theatre 
produced  Mr.  Wilkie  Collins's  melodrama  of  The  LigJit-hovse,  which 
afterwards  found  its  way  to  the  public  stage.  To  Dickens,  who 
performed  in  it  with  the  author,  it  afforded  '*  scope  for  a  piece  of 
acting  of  great  povv^er,''  the  old  sailor  Aaron  Gurnock,  which  by  its 
savage  picturesqueness  earned  a  tribute  of  recognition  from  Carlyle. 
No  less  a  hand  than  Stanfield  painted  the  scenery,  and  Dickens 
himself,  besides  writing  the  prologue,  introduced  into  the  piece  a 
ballad  called  The  Story  of  the  Wrecks  a  not  unsuccessful  effort  in 
Cowper's  manner.  At  Christmas,  i856~'57,  there  followed  The 
Frozen  Deep,  another  melodrama  by  the  same  author ;  and  by  this 
time  the  management  of  his  private  theatricals  had  become  to 
Dickens  a  serious  business,  to  be  carried  on  seriously  for  its  own 
sake.  *'  It  was  to  him,"  he  wrote,  **like  writing  a  book  in  com- 
pany;" and  his  young  people  might  learn  from  it  **that  kind  of 
humility  which  is  got  from  the  earned  knowledge  that  whatever  the 
right  hand  finds  to  do  must  be  done  with  the  heart  in  it,  and  in 
a  desperate  earnest."  The  Frozen  Deep  was  several  times  repeated, 
on  one  occasion  for  the  benefit  of  the  daughter  of  the  recently 
deceased  Douglas  Jerrold ;  but  by  the  end  of  January  the  little 
theatre  was  finally  broken  up ;  and  though  Dickens  spent  one  more 
winter  season  at  Tavistock  Plouse,  the  shadow  was  then  already 
falling  upon  his  cheerful  home. 

In  the  midst  of  his  children's  Christmas  gaieties  of  the  year  1855 


DICKENS. 


83 


Dickens  had  given  two  or  three  public  readings  to  wonderful 
audiences  "  in  various  parts  of  the  country.  A  trip  to  Paris  with 
Mr.  Wilkie  Collins  had  followed,  during  which,  as  he  wrote  home, 
he  was  wandering  about  Paris  all  day,  dining  at  all  manner  of 
places,  and  frequenting  the  theatres  at  the  rate  of  two  or  three  a 
night.  I  suppose,"  he  adds,  with  pleasant  self-irony,  as  an  old 
farmer  said  of  Scott,  I  am  *  makin'  myseP '  all  the  time ;  but  I  seem 
to  be  rather  a  free-and-easy  sort  of  superior  vagabond."  And  in 
truth  a  roving,  restless  spirit  was  strong  upon  him  in  these  years. 
Already,  in  April,  he  speaks  of  himself  as  going  off ;  I  don^t  know 
where  or  how  far,  to  ponder  about  I  donH  know  what."  France, 
Switzerland,  Spain,  Constantinople,  in  Mr.  Layard's  company,  had 
been  successively  in  his  thoughts,  and,  for  aught  he  knew,  Green- 
land and  the  North  Pole  might  occur  to  him  next.  At  the  same 
time  he  foresaw  that  the  end  of  it  all  would  be  his  shutting  himself 
up  in  some  out-of-the-way  place  of  which  he  had  not  yet  thought, 
and  going  desperately  to  work  there. 

Before,  however,  these  phantasmagoric  schemes  had  subsided 
into  the  quiet  plan  of  an  autumn  visit  to  Folkestone,  followed  dur- 
ing the  winter  and  spring  by  a  residence  at  Paris,  he  had  at  least 
found  a  subject  to  ponder  on,  which  was  to  suggest  an  altogether 
novel  element  in  his  next  work  of  fiction.  I  have  said  that  though, 
like  the  majority  of  his  fellow-countrymen,  Dickens  regarded  our 
war  with  Russia  as  inevitable,  yet  his  hatred  of  all  war,  and  his 
imxpatience  of  the  exaggerations  of  passion  and  sentiment  which  all 
war  produces,  had  preserved  him  from  himself  falling  a  victim  to 
their  contagion.  On  the  other  hand,  when  in  the  winter  of  1854- 
'55  the  note  of  exultation  in  the  bravery  of  our  soldiers  in  the 
Crimea  began  to  be  intermingled  with  complaints  against  the  griev- 
ously defective  arrangements  for  their  comfort  and  health,  and 
when  these  complaints,  stimulated  by  the  loud-voiced  energy  of 
the  press,  and  extending  into  censures  upon  the  whole  antiquated 
and  perverse  system  of  our  army  administration,  speedily  swelled 
into  a  roar  of  popular  indignation,  sincere  conviction  ranged  him 
on  the  side  of  the  most  uncompromising  malcontents.  He  was  at 
all  times  ready  to  give  vent  to  that  antipathy  against  officialism 
which  is  shared  by  so  large  a  number  of  Englishmen.  Though  the 
son  of  a  dock-yard  official,  he  is  found  roundly  asserting  that 

more  obstruction  of  good  things  and  patronage  of  bad  things  has 
been  committed  in  the  dock-yards  —  as  in  everything  connected 
with  the  misdirection  of  the  navy  —  than  in  every  other  branch  of 
the  public  service  put  together,  including"  —  the  particularisation  is 
hard  —  '*even  the  Woods  and  Forests."  He  had  listened,  we  mav 
be  sure,  to  the  scornful  denunciations  launched  by  the  prophet  of 
the  Latter-Day  Pamphlets  against  Downing  Street  and  all  its 
works,  and  to  the  proclamation  of  the  great,  though  rather  vague, 
truth,  that  "  reform  in  that  Downing  Street  department  of  affairs  is 
precisely  the  reform  which  were  worth  all  others."  And  now  the 
heartrending  sufferings  of  multitudes  of  brave  men  had  brought  to 
light,  in  one  department  of  the  public  administration,  a  series  of 


84 


DICKENS, 


complications  and  perversities  which  in  the  end  became  so  patent 
to  the  Government  itself  that  they  had  to  be  roughly  remedied  in 
the  very  midst  of  the  struggle.  The  cry  for  administrative  reform, 
vi^hich  arose  in  the  year  1855,  however  crude  the  form  it  frequently 
took,  was  in  itself  a  logical  enough  result  of  the  situation  ;  and  there 
is  no  doubt  that  the  angriness  of  the  complaint  was  intensified  by 
the  attitude  taken  up  in  the  House  of  Commons  by  the  head  of  the 
Government  towards  the  pertinacious  politician  who  made  himself 
the  mouthpiece  of  the  extreme  demands  of  the  feeling  outside. 
Mr.  Layard  was  Dickens's  valued  friend ;  and  the  share  is  thus 
easily  explained  which  —  against  his  otherwise  uniform  practice  of 
abstaining  from  public  meetings  —  the  most  popular  writer  of  the 
day  took  in  the  Administrative  Reform  meetings,  held  in  Drury 
Lane  Theatre,  on  June  27,  1855.  The  speech  which  he  delivered 
on  this  occasion,  and  which  was  intended  to  aid  in  forcing  the 
*'  whole  question"  of  Administrative  Reform  upon  the  attention  of 
an  unwilling  Government,  possesses  no  value  whatever  in  connex- 
ion with  its  theme,  though  of  course  it  is  not  devoid  of  some  smart 
and  telling  hits.  Not  on  the  platform,  but  at  his  desk  as  an  author, 
was  Dickens  to  do  real  service  to  the  cause  of  administrative  effi- 
ciency. For  whilst  invective  of  a  general  kind  runs  off  like  water 
from  the  rock  of  usage,  even  Circumlocution  Offices  are  not  insen- 
sible to  the  acetous  force  of  satire. 

Dickens's  caricature  of  British  officialism  formed  the  most  gener- 
ally attractive  element  in  the  story  of  Little  Dorrit  —  originally 
intended  to  be  called  Nobody^ s  Fault — which  he  published  in 
monthly  numbers,  from  December,  1855,  that  year,  to  June,  1857. 
He  was  solemnly  taken  to  task  for  his  audacity  by  the  Edijiburgh 
Review,  which  reproached  him  for  his  persistent  ridicule  of  **the 
institutions  of  the  country,  the  laws,  the  administration,  in  a  word, 
the  government  under  which  we  hve.''  His  charges"  were  treated 
as  hardly  seriously  meant,  but  as  worthy  of  severe  reprobation, 
because  likely  to  be  seriously  taken  by  the  poor,  the  uneducated, 
and  the  young.  And  the  caricaturist,  besides  being  reminded  of  the 
names  of  several  eminent  public  servants,  was  specially  requested  to 
look,  as  upon  a  picture  contrasting  with  his  imaginary  Circumlocu- 
tion Office,  upon  the  Post  Office,  or  —  for  the  choice  offered  was 
not  more  extensive  —  upon  the  London  police,  so  liberally  praised 
by  himself  in  his  own  journal.  The  delighted  author  of  Little 
Dorrit  replied  to  this  not  very  skilful  diatribe  in  a  short  and 
spirited  rejoinder  in  Household  Words.  In  this  he  judiciously  con- 
fined himself  to  refuting  an  unfounded  incidental  accusation  in  the 
Edinburgh  article,  and  to  dwelling,  as  upon  a  "  Curious  Misprint," 
upon  the  indignant  query:  How  does  he  account  for  the  career 
of  Mr,  Rowland  HilW'^  whose  name,  as  an  example  of  the  ready 
intelligence  of  the  Circumlocution  Office,  was  certainly  an  odd 
erratum.  Had  he,  however,  cared  to  make  a  more  general  reply 
to  the  main  article  of  the  indictment,  he  might  have  pointed  out 
that,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  our  official  administrative  machinery  had 
recently  broken  down  in  one  of  its  most  important  branches,  and 


DICKENS. 


85 


that  circumlocution,  in  the  literal  sense  of  the  word  —  circumlocu- 
tion between  department  and  department,  or  office  and  office  —  had 
been  one  of  the  principal  causes  of  the  collapse.  The  general  drift 
of  the  satire  was,  therefore,  in  accordance  with  fact,  and  the  satire 
itself  salutary  in  its  character.  To  quarrel  with  it  for  not  taking 
into  consideration  what  might  be  said  on  the  other  side,  was  to 
quarrel  with  the  method  of  treatment  which  satire  has  at  all  times 
considered  itself  entitled  to  adopt;  while  to  stigmatise  a  popular 
book  as  likely  to  mislead  the  ill-informed,  was  to  suggest  a  restraint 
which  would  have  deprived  wit  and  humour  of  most  of  their  oppor- 
tunities of  rendering  service  to  either  a  good  or  an  evil  cause. 

A  far  more  legitimate  exception  has  been  taken  to  these  Circum- 
locution Office  episodes  as  defective  in  art  by  the  very  reason  of 
their  being  exaggerations.  Those  best  acquainted  with  the  interiors 
of  our  government  offices  may  be  right  in  denying  that  the  Barnacles 
can  be  regarded  as  an  existing  type.  Indeed,  it  would  at  no  time 
have  been  easy  to  point  to  any  office  quite  as  labyrinthine,  or  quite 
as  bottomless,  as  that  permanently  presided  over  by  Mr.  Tile  Bar- 
nacle ;  to  any  chief  secretary  or  commissioner  so  absolutely  wooden 
of  fibre  as  he ;  or  to  any  private  secretary  so  completely  absorbed 
in  his  eye-glass  as  Barnacle  junior.  But  as  satirical  figures  they 
one  and  all  fulfil  their  purpose  as  thoroughly  as  the  picture  of  the 
official  sanctum  itself,  with  its  furniture  "in  the  higher  official 
manner,"  and  its  ''general  bamboozling  air  of  how  not  to  do  it." 
The  only  question  is,  whether  satire  which,  if  it  is  to  be  effective, 
must  be  of  a  piece  and  in  its  way  exaggerated,  is  not  out  of  place  in 
a  pathetic  and  humorous  fiction,  where,  like  a  patch  of  too  diverse 
a  thread,  it  interferes  with  the  texture  into  which  it  is  introduced. 
In  themselves  these  passages  of  Litile  Dorrit  deserve  to  remain  un- 
forgotten  amongst  the  masterpieces  of  literary  caricature  ;  and  there 
is,  I  do  not  hesitate  to  say,  something  of  Swiftian  force  in  their 
grotesque  embodiment  of  a  popular  current  of  indignation.  The 
mere  name  of  the  Circumlocution  Office  was  a  stroke  of  genius,  one 
of  those  phrases  of  Dickens  which  Professor  Masson  justly  describes 
as,  whether  exaggerated  or  not,  "  effxacious  for  social  reform."  As 
usual,  Dickens  had  made  himself  well  acquainted  with  the  formal  or 
outside  part  of  his  subject ;  the  very  air  of  Whitehall  seemiS  to 
gather  round  us  as  Mr.  Tite  Barnacle,  in  answer  to  a  persistent  en- 
quirer who  "wants  to  know"  the  position  of  a  particular  matter, 
concedes  that  it  "  may  have  been,  in  the  course  of  official  business, 
referred  to  the  Circumlocution  Office  for  its  consideration,"  and 
that  "the  department  may  have  either  originated,  or  confirmed,  a 
minute  on  the  subject."  In  the  Household  Words  paper  called  A 
Poor  MaiCs  Tale  of  a  Patent  (1850)  will  be  found  a  sufficiently 
elaborate  study  for  Mr.  Doyce's  experiences  of  the  government  of 
his  country,  as  wrathfully  narrated  by  Mr.  Meagles. 

With  the  exception  of  the  Circumlocution  Office  passages  —  adven- 
titious as  they  are  to  the  progress  of  the  action  —  Little  Dorrit 
exhibits  a  palpable  falling-off  in  inventive  power.  Forster  illustrates 
by  a  striking  facsimile  the  difference  betv/cen  the  "labour  and 


86 


DICKENS. 


pains of  the  author's  short  notes  for  Little  Dorrit  and  the  Hght- 
ness  and  confidence  of  handhng  "  in  what  hints  he  had  jotted  down 
for  David  Copperfield.  Indeed,  his  "  tablets"  had  about  this  time 
beu;un  to  be  an  essential  part  of  his  literary  equipment.  But  in 
Little  Dorrit  there  are  enough  internal  signs  of,  possibly  uncon- 
scious, lassitude.  The  earlier,  no  doubt,  is,  in  every  respect,  the 
better  part  of  the  book ;  or,  rather,  the  later  part  shows  the  author 
wearily  at  work  upon  a  canvas  too  wide  for  him,  and  filling  it  up 
v/ith  a  crowd  of  personages  in  whom  it  is  difficult  to  take  much 
interest.  Even  Mr.  Merdle  and  his  catastrophe  produce  the  efifect 
rather  of  a  ghastly  allegory  than  of  an  extravagant  conception," 
as  the  author  ironically  called  it  in  his  preface,  derived  only  too 
directly  from  real  life.  In  the  earlier  part  of  the  book,  in  so  far  as 
it  is  not  once  again  concerned  with  enforcing  the  moral  of  Hard 
Ti7nes  in  a  different  way,  by  means  of  Mrs.  Clennam  and  her  son's 
early  history,  the  humour  of  Dickens  plays  freely  over  the  figure  of 
the  Father  of  the  Marshalsea.  It  is  a  psychological  masterpiece  in 
its  way ;  but  the  revolting  selfishness  of  Little  Dorrit's  father  is  not 
redeemed  artistically  by  her  own  long-sufferino: ;  for  her  pathos 
lacks  the  old  irresistible  ring.  Doubtless  much  in  this  part  of  the 
story  —  the  whole  episode,  for  instance,  of  the  honest  turnkey  —  is 
in  the  author's  best  manner.  But,  admirable  as  it  is,  this  new 
picture  of  prison-life  and  prison-sentiment  has  an  undercurrent  of 
bitterness,  indeed,  almost  of  contemptuousness,  foreign  to  the  best 
part  of  Dickens's  genius.  This  is  still  more  perceptible  in  a  figure 
not  less  true  to  life  than  the  Father  of  the  Marshalsea  himself  — 
Flora,  the  overblown  flower  of  Arthur  Clennam's  bo)dsh  love. 
The  humour  of  the  conception  is  undeniable,  but  the  whole  effect  is 
cruel ;  and,  though  greatly  amused,  the  reader  feels  almost  as  if  he 
were  abetting  a  profanation.  Dickens  could  not  have  become  what 
he  is  to  the  great  multitude  of  his  readers  had  he,  as  a  humourist, 
often  indulged  in  this  cynical  mood. 

There  is  in  general  little  in  the  characters  of  this  fiction  to  com- 
pensate for  the  sense  of  oppression  from  which,  as  he  follows  the 
slow  course  of  its  far  from  striking  plot,  the  reader  finds  it  difficult 
to  free  himself.  A  vein  of  genuine  humour  shows  itself  in  Mr. 
Plornish,  obviously  a  favourite  of  the  author's,  and  one  of  those 
genuine  working-men,  as  rare  in  fiction  as  on  the  stage,  where  Mr. 
Toole  has  reproduced  the  species  ;  but  the  relation  between  Mr.  and 
Mrs.  Plornish  is  only  a  fainter  revival  of  that  between  Mr.  and  Mrs. 
Bagney.  Nor  is  there  anything  fresh  or  novel  in  the  characters 
belonging  to  another  social  sphere.  Henry  Gowan,  apparently 
intended  as  an  elaborate  study  in  psychology,  is  only  a  very  tedious 
one ;  and  his  mother  at  Hampton  Court,  whatever  phase  of  a 
dilapidated  aristocracy  she  may  be  intended  to  caricature,  is  merely 
ill-bred.  As  for  Mrs.  General,  she  is  so  sorry  a  burlesque  that  she 
could  not  be  reproduced  without  extreme  caution  even  on  the  stage 
—  to  the  reckless  conventionalities  of  which,  indeed,  the  whole 
picture  of  the  Dorrit  family  as  nouveaux  riches  bears  a  striking 
resemblance.    There  is,  on  the  contrary,  some  good  caricature, 


DICKENS. 


87 


which,  in  one  instance  at  least,  was  thought  transparent  by  the 
knowing,  in  the  silhouettes  of  the  great  Mr.  Merdle's  professional 
guests  ;  but  these  are,  like  the  Circumlocution  Office  puppets,  satiric 
sketches,  not  the  living  figures  of  creative  humour. 

I  have  spoken  of  this  story  with  a  censure  which  may  be  regarded 
as  exaggerated  in  its  turn.  But  I  v/ell  remember,  at  the  time  of  its 
publication  in  numbers,  the  general  consciousness  that  Little  Dor- 
I'it  was  proving  unequal  to  the  high-strung  expectations  which  a 
new  work  by  Dickens  then  excited  in  his  admirers,  both  young  and 
old.  There  w^ere  new  and  striking  features  in  it,  with  abundant 
comic  and  serious  effect,  but  there  was  no  power  in  the  whole 
story  to  seize  and  hold,  and  the  feeling  could  not  be  escaped  that 
the  author  was  not  at  his  best.  And  Dickens  was  not  at  his 
best  when  he  wrote  Little  Do?'rit.  Yet  while  nothing  is  more 
remarkable  in  the  literary  career  of  Dickens  than  this  apparently 
speedy  decline  of  his  power,  nothing  is  more  wonderful  in  it  than 
the  degree  to  which  he  righted  himself  again,  not,  indeed,  with  his 
public,  for  the  public  never  deserted  its  favourite,  but  with  his 
genius. 

A  considerable  part  of  Little  Dorrit  must  have  been  written 
in  Paris,  where,  in  October,  after  a  quiet  autumn  at  Folkestone, 
Dickens  had  taken  a  family  apartment  in  the  Avenue  des  Champs 
£lys6es,  *'  about  half  a  quarter  of  a  mile  above  Franconi's."  Here, 
after  his  fashion,  he  lived  much  to  himself,  his  family,  and  his 
guests,  only  occasionally  finding  his  way  into  a  literary  or  artis- 
tic salon;  but  he  sat  for  his  portrait  to  both  Ary  and  Henri 
Scheffer,  and  was  easily  persuaded  to  read  his  O'icket  on  the 
Hearth  to  an  audience  in  the  atelier.  Macready  and  Mr.  Wilkie 
Collins  were  in  turn  the  companions  of  many  *'  theatrical  and 
lounging"  evenings.  Intent  as  Dickens  now  had  become  upon 
the  technicalities  of  his  own  form  of  composition,  this  interest 
must  have  been  greatly  stimulated  by  the  frequent  comparison 
of  modern  French  plays,  in  most  of  which  nicety  of  construction 
and  effectiveness  of  situation  have  so  paramount  a  significance.  At 
Boulogne,  too,  Mr.  Wilkie  Collins  was  a  welcome  summer  visitor. 
And  in  the  autumn  the  two  friends  started  on  the  Lazy  Tour  of 
Two  Idle  Apprentices,  It  came  to  an  untimely  end  as  a  pedestrian 
excursion,  but  the  record  of  it  is  one  of  the  pleasantest  memorials 
of  a  friendship  which  brightened  much  of  Dickens's  life  and  inten- 
sified his  activity  in  work  as  well  as  in  pleasure. 

Mr.  Thomas  Idle"  had  indeed  a  busy  time  of  it  in  this  year 
1857.  The  publication  of  Little  Dorrit  was  not  finished  till  June, 
and  in  August  we  find  him,  between  a  reading  and  a  performance 
of  The  Frozen  Deep  at  Manchester — then  in  the  exciting  days  of 
the  great  Art  Exhibition  —  thus  describing  to  Macready  his  way 
of  filling  up  his  time:  *'I  hope  you  have  seen  my  tussle  with 
the  Edinburgh,  I  saw  the  chance  last  Friday  week,  as  I  was 
going  dov.'n  to  read  the  Carol  in  St.  Martin's  Hall.  Instantly 
turned  to,  then  and  there,  and  wrote  half  the  article,  flew  out 
of  bed  early  next  morning,  and  finished  it  by  noon.    Went  dov.-n 


88 


DICKENS. 


to  Gallery  of  Illustration  (we  acted  that  night),  did  the  day's 
business,  corrected  the  proofs  in  Polar  costume  in  dressing-room, 
broke  up  two  numbers  of  Household  Words  to  get  it  out  directly, 
played  in  Frozen  Deep  and  Uncle  John^  presided  at  supper  of  com- 
pany, made  no  end  of  speeches,  went  home  and  gave  in  completely 
for  four  hours,  then  got  sound  asleep,  and  next  day  was  as  fresh  as 
you  used  to  be  in  the  far-off  days  of  your  lusty  youth."  It  was  on 
the  occasion  of  the  readings  at  St.  Martin's  Hall,  for  the  benefit  of 
Douglas  Jerrold's  family,  that  the  thought  of  giving  readings  for 
his  own  benefit  first  suggested  itself  to  Dickens ;  and,  as  will 
seen,  by  April,  1858,  the  idea  had  been  carried  into  execution, 
and  a  new  phase  of  life  had  begun  for  him.  And  yet  at  this 
very  time,  when  his  home  was  about  to  cease  being  in  the  full- 
est sense  a  home  to  Dickens,  by  a  strange  irony  of  fortune,  he 
had  been  enabled  to  carry  out  a  long-cherished  fancy  and  to 
take  possession,  in  the  first  instance  as  a  summer  residence,  of 
the  house  on  Gad's  Hill,  of  which  a  lucky  chance  had  made  him 
the  owner  rather  more  than  a  twelvemonth  before. 

My  little  place,"  he  wrote  in  1858,  to  his  Swiss  friend  Cerjat, 
*'  is  a  grave  red-brick  house  (time  of  George  the  First,  I  suppose), 
which  1  have  added  to  and  stuck  bits  upon  in  all  manner  of  ways, 
so  that  it  is  as  pleasantly  irregular,  and  as  violently  opposed  to  ail 
architectural  ideas,  as  the  most  hopeful  man  could  possibly  desire. 
It  is  on  the  summit  of  Gad's  Hill.  The  robbery  was  committed 
before  the  door,  on  the  man  with  the  treasure,  and  Falstaff  ran 
away  from  the  identical  spot  of  ground  now  covered  by  the  room 
in  which  I  write.  A  little  rustic  ale-house,  called  *  The  Sir  John 
Falstaff,'  is  over  the  way  —  has  been  over  the  way  ever  since,  in 
honour  of  the  event.  .  .  .  The  whole  stupendous  property  is  on 
the  old  Dover  road."  .  .  . 

y\mong  "  the  blessed  woods  and  fields"  which,  as  he  says,  had 
done  him  a  world  of  good,"  in  a  season  of  unceasing  bodily  and 
mental  unrest,  the  great  English  writer  had  indeed  found  a  habita- 
tion fitted  to  become  inseparable  from  his  name  and  fame.  It  was 
not  till  rather  later,  in  i860,  that,  after  the  sale  of  Tavistock  House, 
Gad's  Hill  Place  became  his  regular  abode,  a  London  house  being 
only  now  and  then  taken  for  the  season,  while  furnished  rooms 
were  kept  at  the  office  in  Wellington  Street  for  occasional  use. 
And  it  was  only  gradually  that  he  enlarged  ?.nd  improved  his  Kent- 
ish place  so  as  to  make  it  the  pretty  and  comfortable  country-house 
which  at  the  present  day  it  appears  to  be ;  constructing,  in  course 
of  time,  the  passage  under  the  high-road  to  the  shrubbery,  where 
the  Swiss  chalet  given  to  him  by  Mr.  Fechter  was  set  up,  and 
building  the  pretty  little  conservatory,  which,  when  completed,  he 
was  not  to  live  many  days  to  enjoy.  But  an  old-fashioned,  homely 
look,  free  from  the  slightest  affectation  of  quietness,  belonged  to 
Gad's  Hill  Place,  even  after  all  these  alterations,  and  belongs  to  it 
even  at  this  day,  when  Dickens's  solid  old-fashioned  furniture  has 
been  changed.  In  the  pretty  little  front  hall  still  hangs  the  illumi- 
nated tablet  recalling  the  legend  of  Gad's  Hill ;  and  on  the  inside 


DICKENS. 


89 


panels  of  the  library  door  remain  the  facetious  sham  book-titles  : 
"  Hudson's  Coinplete  Failure^''  and  "  Ten  Minutes  in  Chi?ui,'*^  and 
*'  Cats'  Lives,''''  and,  on  a  long  series  of  leather  backs,  **  Hansard's 
Guide  to  Refreshing  Sleeps  The  rooms  are  all  of  a  modest  size, 
and  the  bedrooms  —  amongst  them  Dickens's  own  —  very  low  ;  but 
the  whole  house  looks  thoroughly  habitable,  while  the  views  across 
the  cornfields  at  the  back  are  such  as  in  their  undulation  of  soft 
outline  are  nowhere  more  pleasant  than  in  Kent.  Rochester  and 
the  Medway  are  near,  even  for  those  who  do  not  —  like  Dickens 
and  his  dogs  —  count  a  stretch  past  three  or  four  "  mile-stones  on 
the  Dover  road''  as  the  mere  beginning  of  an  afternoon's  walk.  At 
a  distance  little  greater  there  are  in  one  direction  the  green  glades 
of  Cobham  Park,  with  Chalk  and  Gravesend  beyond ;  and  in 
another  the  flat  country  towards  the  Thames,  with  its  abundance 
of  market-gardens.  There,  too,  are  the  marshes  on  the  border  of 
which  lie  the  massive  ruin  of  Cooling  Castle,  the  refuge  of  the  Lol- 
lard martyr  who  was  not  concerned  in  the  affair  on  Gad's  Hill,  and 
Cooling  Church  and  church-yard,  with  the  quaint  little  gravestones 
in  the  grass.  London  and  the  office  were  within  easy  reach,  and 
Paris  itself  was,  for  practical  purposes,  not  much  farther  away,  so 
that,  in  later  days  at  all  events,  Dickens  found  himself  crossing 
the  Channel  perpetually." 

The  name  of  Dickens  still  has  a  good  sound  in  and  about 
Gad's  HilL  He  was  on  very  friendly  terms  with  some  families 
whose  houses  stand  near  to  his  own ;  and  though  nothing  was 
farther  from  his  nature,  as  he  says,  than  to  *'wear  topboots " 
and  play  the  squire,  yet  he  had  in  him  not  a  little  of  v/hat 
endears  so  many  a  resident  country  gentleman  to  his  neighbour- 
hood. He  was  head  organiser  rather  than  chief  patron  of  village 
sports,  of  cricket  matches  and  foot  races  ;  and  his  house  was 
a  dispensary  for  the  poor  of  the  parish.  He  established  confi- 
dential relations  between  his  house  and  the  Falstaff  Inn  over 
the  way,  regulating  his  servants'  consumption  of  beer  on  a  strict 
but  liberal  plan  of  his  own  devising;  but  it  is  not  for  this 
reason  only  that  the  successor  of  Mr.  Edwin  Trood  —  for  such 
was  the  veritable  name  of  mine  host  of  the  Falstaff"  in  Dickens's 
time  —  declares  that  it  was  a  bad  day  for  the  neighbourhood  when 
Dickens  was  taken  away  from  it.  In  return,  nothing  could  exceed 
the  enthusiasm  which  surrounded  him  in  his  own  country ;  and 
Forster  has  described  his  astonishment  at  the  manifestation  of  it 
on  the  occasion  of  the  wedding  of  the  youngest  daughter  of 
the  house  in  i860.  And,  indeed,  he  was  born  to  be  popular, 
and  specially  among  those  by  whom  he  was  beloved  as  a  friend 
or  honoured  as  a  benefactor. 

But  it  was  not  for  long  intervals  of  either  work  or  rest  that 
Dickens  w^as  to  settle  down  in  his  pleasant  country  house,  nor 
was  he  ever,  except  quite  at  the  last,  to  sit  down  under  his  own 
roof  in  peace  and  quiet,  a  w^anderer  no  more.  Less  than  a  year 
after  he  had  taken  up  his  residence  for  the  summer  on  Gad's 
Hill  his  home,  and  that  of  his  younger  children,  was  his  wife's 


90 


DICKENS. 


home  no  longer.  The  separation,  which  appears  to  have  been 
preparing  itself  for  some,  but  no  very  long,  time,  took  place  in 
May,  1858,  when,  after  an  amicable  arrangement,  Mrs.  Dickens 
left  her  husband,  who  henceforth  allowed  her  an  ample  separate 
maintenance,  and  occasionally  corresponded  with  her,  but  never 
saw  her  again.  The  younger  children  remained  in  their  father's 
house  under  the  self-sacrihcing  and  devoted  care  of  Mrs.  Dick- 
ens's surviving  sister.  Miss  Hogarth.  Shortly  afterwards,  Dickens 
thought  it  well,  in  printed  words  which  may  be  left  forgotten,  to 
rebut  som.e  slanderous  gossip  which,  as  the  way  of  the  world  is, 
had  misrepresented  the  circumstances  of  this  separation.  The 
causes  of  the  event  were  an  open  secret  to  his  friends  and  ac- 
quaintances. If  he  had  ever  loved  his  wife  with  that  affection 
before  which  so-called  incompatibilities  of  habits,  temper,  or 
disposition  fade  into  nothingness,  there  is  no  indication  of  it  in 
any  of  his  numerous  letters  addressed  to  her.  Neither  has  it 
ever  been  pretended  that  he  strove  in  the  direction  of  that  resig- 
nation which  love  and  duty  together  made  possible  to  David 
Copperfield,  or  even  that  he  remained  in  every  way  master  of 
himself,  as  many  men  have  known  how  to  remain,  the  story 
of  whose  wedded  life  and  its  disappointments  has  never  been 
WTitten  in  history  or  figured  in  fiction.  It  was  not  incumbent  upon 
his  faithful  friend  and  biographer,  and  much  less  can  it  be  upon 
one  whom  nothing  but  a  sincere  admiration  of  Dickens's  genius 
entitles  to  speak  of  him  at  all,  to  declare  the  standard  by  which 
the  most  painful  transaction  in  his  life  is  to  be  judged.  I  say 
the  most  painful,  for  it  is  with  a  feeling  akin  to  satisfaction  that 
one  reads,  in  a  letter  three  years  afterwards  to  a  lady  in  reference 
to  her  daughter's  wedding:  I  want  to  thank  you  also  for  think- 
ing of  me  on  the  occasion,  but  I  feel  that  I  am  better  away  from  it. 
I  should  really  have  a  misgiving  that  I  was  a  sort  of  a  shadow  on  a 
young  marriage,  and  you  will  understand  me  when  I  say  so,  and 
no  more."  A  shadow,  too  —  who  would  deny  it?  —  falls  on  every 
one  of  the  pictures  in  which  the  tenderest  of  modern  humourists 
has  painted  the  simple  joys  and  the  sacred  sorrows  of  that  home 
life  of  which  to  his  generation  he  had  become  almost  the  poet 
and  the  prophet,  when  we  remember  how  he  was  himself  neither 
blessed  with  its  full  happiness  nor  capable  of  accepting  with  resig- 
nation the  imperfection  inherent  in  it,  as  in  all  things  human. 


DICKENS. 


91 


CHAPTER  Vr. 

LAST  YEARS. 
[1858-1870.] 

The  last  twelve  years  of  Dickens's  life  were  busy  years,  lilce  the 
others ;  but  his  activity  was  no  longer  merely  the  expression  of  exu- 
berant force,  and  long  before  the  collapse  came  he  had  been  repeat- 
edly warned  of  the  risks  he  continued  to  defy.  When,  however,  he 
fu'st  entered  upon  those  public  readings,  by  persisting  in  which  he 
indisputably  hastened  his  end,  neither  he  nor  his  friends  took  into 
account  the  fear  of  bodily  ill-effects  resulting  from  his  exertions. 
Their  misgivings  had  other  grounds.  Of  course,  had  there  been 
any  pressure  of  pecuniary  difficulty  or  need  upon  Dickens  when  he 
began,  or  when  on  successive  occasions  he  resumed,  his  public 
readings,  there  would  be  nothing  further  to  be  said.  But  I  see  no 
suggestion  of  any  such  pressure.  My  worldly  circumstances,'*  he 
wrote  before  he  had  finally  made  up  his  mind  to  read  in  America, 
*'  are  very  good.  I  don't  want  money.  All  my  possessions  are  free 
and  in  the  best  order.  Still,"  he  added,  '*at  fifty-five  or  fifty-six, 
the  likelihood  of  making  a  very  great  addition  to  one's  capital  in 
half  a  year  is  an  immense  consideration,"  Moreover,  with  all  his 
love  of  doing  as  he  chose,  and  his  sense  of  the  value  of  such  free- 
dom to  him  as  a  writer,  he  was  a  man  of  simple  though  liberal 
habits  of  life,  with  no  taste  for  the  gorgeous  or  capricious  extrava- 
gances of  a  Balzac  or  a  Dumas,  nor  can  he  have  been  at  a  loss  how 
to  make  due  provision  for  those  whom  in  the  course  of  nature  he 
would  leave  behind  him.  Love  of  money  for  its  own  sake,  or  for 
that  of  the  futilities  it  can  purchase,  was  altogether  foreign  to  his 
nature.  At  the  same  time,  the  rapid  making  of  large  sums  has 
potent  attractions  for  most  men ;  and  these  attractions  are  perhaps 
strongest  for  those  who  engage  in  the  pursuit  for  the  sake  of  the 
race  as  well  as  of  the  prize.  Dickens's  readings  were  virtually  some- 
thing new;  their  success  was  not  only  all  his  own,  but  unique  and 
unprecedented  —  what  nobody  but  himself  ever  had  achieved  or  ever 
could  have  achieved.  Yet  the  determining  motive  —  if  I  read  his 
nature  rightly  —  was,  after  all,  of  another  kind.  **  Two  souls  dwelt 
in  his  breast ;  "  and  when  their  aspirations  united  in  one  appeal  it 
was  irresistible.  The  author  who  craved  for  the  visible  signs  of  a 
sympathy  responding  to  that  which  he  felt  for  his  multitude  of 
readers,  and  the  actor  who  longed  to  mipersonate  creations  already 


92 


DICKENS, 


beings  of  flesh  and  blood  to  himself,  were  both  astir  in  him,  and  in 
both  capacities  he  felt  himself  drawn  into  the  very  publicity  depre- 
cated by  his  friends.  He  liked,  as  one  who  knew  him  thoroughly 
said  to  me,  to  be  face  to  face  with  his  public ;  and  against  this  liking, 
which  he  had  already  indulged  as  fully  as  he  could  without  passing 
the  boundaries  between  private  and  professional  life,  arguments  were 
in  vain.  It  has  been  declared  sheer  pedantry  to  speak  of  such  bound- 
aries ;  and  to  suggest  that  there  is  anything  degrading  in  paid  read- 
ings such  as  those  of  Dickens  would,  on  the  face  of  it,  be  absurd. 
On  the  other  hand,  the  author  who,  on  or  off  the  stage,  becomes 
the  interpreter  of  his  v/ritings  to  large  audiences,  more  especially  if 
he  docs  his  best  to  stereotype  his  interpretation  by  constantly 
repeating  it,  limits  his  own  prerogative  of  being  many  things  to 
many  men ;  and  where  the  author  of  a  w^ork,  more  particularly  of 
a  work  of  fiction,  adjusts  it  to  circumstances  differing  from  those  of 
its  production,  he  allows  the  requirements  of  the  lesser  art  to  pre- 
judice the  claims  of  the  greater. 

Dickens  cannot  have  been  blind  to  these  considerations ;  but  to 
others  his  eyes  were  never  opened.  He  found  much  that  was  in- 
spiriting in  his  success  as  a  reader,  and  this  not  only  in  the  large 
sums  he  gained,  or  even  in  the  "roaring  sea  of  response,"  to  use 
his  own  fine  metaphor,  of  which  he  had  become  accustomed  to 

stand  upon  the  beach.''  His  truest  sentiment  as  an  author  was 
touched  to  the  quick ;  and  he  was,  as  he  says  himself,  ^'  brought 
very  near  to  what  he  had  sometimes  dreamed  might  be  his  fame," 
when,  at  York,  a  lady,  whose  face  he  had  never  seen,  stopped  him 
in  the  street,  and  said  to  him,  Mr.  Dickens,  will  you  let  me  touch 
the  hand  that  has  filled  my  house  with  many  friends?"  or  v/hen,  at 
Belfast,  he  was  almost  overwhelmed  with  entreaties  "to  shake 
hands,  Misther  Dickens,  and  God  bless  you,  sir;  not  ounly  for  the 
light  you've  been  in  mee  house,  sir  —  and  God  love  your  face  !  —  this 
many  a  year."  On  the  other  hand  —  and  this,  perhaps,  a  nature 
like  his  would  not  be  the  quickest  to  perceive — there  was  some- 
thing vulgarising  in  the  constant  striving  after  immediate  success 
in  the  shape  of  large  audiences,  loud  applause,  and  satisfactory 
receipts.  The  conditions  of  the  actors  art  cannot  forego  these 
stimulants ;  and  this  is  precisely  his  disadvantage  in  compa.rison 
with  artists  who  are  able  to  possess  themselves  in  quiet.  To  me, 
at  least,  it  is  painful  to  find  Dickens  jubilantly  recording  how  at 
Dublin  "eleven  bank-notes  were  thrust  into  the  pay-box  —  Arthur 
saw  them  —  at  one  time  for  eleven  stalls  ;  "  how  at  Edinburgh 
"  neither  Grisi,  nor  Jenny  Lind,  nor  anything,  nor  anybody,  seems 
to  make  the  least  effect  on  the  draw  of  the  readings ; "  while,  every 
allowance  being  made,  there  is  something  almost  ludicrous  in  the 
double  assertion,  that  "  the  most  delicate  audience  I  had  ever  seen 
in  any  provincial  place  is  Canterbury;  but  the  audience  with  the 
greatest  sense  of  humour  certainly  is  Dover."  What  subjects  for 
parody  Dickens  would  have  found  in  these  innocent  ecstasies  if 
u'.tered  by  any  other  man  !  Undoubtedly,  this  enthusiasm  was 
closely  connected  with  the  very  thoroughness  with  v*^hich  he  entered 


DICKENS, 


93 


into  the  work  of  his  readings.  You  have  no  idea,"  he  tells  Fors- 
ter,  in  1867,  how  1  have  worked  at  them.  Finding  it  necessary, 
as  their  reputation  widened,  that  they  should  be  better  than  at  first, 
I  have  leanit  them  all,  so  as  to  have  no  mechanical  drawback  in 
looking  after  the  words.  I  have  tested  all  the  serious  passion  in 
them  by  everything  I  know ;  made  the  humorous  points  much  more 
humorous ;  corrected  my  utterance  of  certain  words  ;  cultivated  a 
self-possession  not  to  be  disturbed ;  and  made  myself  master  of  the 
situation."  From  ten  years  ago  to  last  night,"  he  writes  to  his 
son  from  Baltimore  in  1868,  I  have  never  read  to  an  audience  but 
I  have  watched  for  an  opportunity  of  striking  out  something  better 
somewhere."  The  freshness  with  which  he  returned  night  after 
night  and  season  after  season  to  the  sphere  of  his  previous  suc- 
cesses, was  itself  a  genuine  actor's  gift.  **So  real,"  he  declares, 
**are  my  fictions  to  myself,  that,  after  hundreds  of  nights,  I  come 
with  a  feeling  of  perfect  freshness  to  that  httle  red  table,  and  laugh 
and  cry  with  my  hearers  as  if  I  had  never  stood  there  before." 

Dickens's  first  public  readings  were  given  at  Birmingham,  during 
the  Christmas  week  of  1853-54,  in  support  of  the  new  Midland 
Institute;  but  a  record  —  for  the  authenticity  of  which  I  cannot 
vouch  —  remains,  that  with  true  theatrical  instinct  he,  before  the 
Christmas  in  question,  gave  a  trial  reading  of  the  Christmas  Carol 
to  a  smaller  public  audience  at  Peterborough.  He  had  since  been 
repeatedly  found  willing  to  read  for  benevolent  purposes ;  and  the 
very  fact  that  it  had  become  necessary  to  decline  some  of  these 
frequent  invitations  had  again  suggested  the  possibility  —  which 
had  occurred  to  him  eleven  years  before  —  of  meeting  the  demand 
in  a  different  way.  Yet  it  may,  after  all,  be  doubted  whether  the 
idea  of  undertaking  an  entire  series  of  paid  public  readings  would 
have  been  carried  out,  had  it  not  been  for  the  general  restlessness 
which  had  seized  upon  Dickens  early  in  1858,  when,  moreover,  he 
had  no  special  task  either  of  labour  or  leisure  to  absorb  him,  and 
when  he  craved  for  excitement  more  than  ever.  To  go  home  —  in 
this  springtime  of  1858  —  was  not  to  find  there  the  peace  of  content- 
ment. "I  must  do  sojnefhing,'*''  he  wrote  in  March  to  his  faithful 
counsellor,  or  I  shall  wear  my  heart  away.  I  can  see  no  better 
thing  to  do  that  is  half  so  hopeful  in  itself,  or  half  so  well  suited  to 
my  restless  state." 

So  by  April  the  die  was  cast,  and  on  the  29th  of  that  month  he 
had  entered  into  his  new  relation  with  the  public.  One  of  the 
strongest  and  most  genuine  impulses  of  his  nature  had  victoriously 
asserted  itself,  and  according  to  his  wont  he  addressed  himself  to 
his  task  with  a  relentless  vigour,  which  flinched  from  no  exertion. 
He  began  witli  a  brief  series  at  St.  Martin's  Hall,  and  then,  his  in- 
valuable friend  Arthur  Smith  continuing  to  act  as  his  manager,  he 
contrived  to  cram  not  less  than  eighty-seven  readings  into  three 
months  and  a  half  of  travelling  in  the  "  provinces,"  including  Scot- 
land and  Ireland.  A  few  v/inter  readings  in  London,  and  a  short 
supplementary  course  in  tlie  country  during  October,  1859,  com- 
pleted this  first  scries.    Already,  in  1858,  we  find  him,  in  a  letter 


94 


DICKENS. 


from  Ireland,  complaining  of  the  tremendous  strain,"  and  declar- 
ing, *'  1  seem  to  be  always  either  in  a  railway  carriage,  or  reading, 
or  going  to  bed.  I  get  so  knocked  up,  whenever  I  have  a  minute 
to  remember  it,  that  then  I  go  to  bed  as  a  matter  of  course."  But 
the  enthusiasm  which  everywhere  welcomed  him  —  I  can  testify  to 
the  thrill  of  excitement  produced  by  his  visit  to  Cambridge,  in 
October,  1859  —  repaid  him  for  his  fatigues.  Scotland  thawed  to 
him,  and  with  Dublin  —  where  his  success  was  extraordinary  —  he 
was  so  smitten  as  to  think  it  at  first  sight  pretty  nigh  as  big  as 
Paris."  In  return,  the  Boots  at  Morrison^s  expressed  the  general 
feeling  in  a  patriotic  point  of  view:  '  Whaat  sart  of  a  hoose, 
sur?'  he  asked  me.  'Capital.'  *  The  Lard  be  praised,  for  the 
'onor  o'  Dooblin.' " 

The  books,  or  portions  of  books,  to  which  he  confined  himself 
during  this  first  series  of  readings  were  few  in  number.  They  com- 
prised the  Carol  and  the  Chimes,  and  two  stories  from  earlier  Christ- 
mas numbers  of  Hoiisehold  Words  —  may  the  exclamation  of  the 
soft-hearted  chambermaid  at  the  Holly  Tree  Inn,  It's  a  shame  to 
part  'em  !  "  never  vanish  from  my  memory  !  —  together  with  the 
episodic  readings  of  the  Trial  in  Pickwick,  Mrs.  Gajnp,  and  Pa7il 
Dombey.  Of  these  the  Pickwick,  which  I  heard  more  than  once,  is 
still  vividly  present  to  me.  The  only  drawback  to  the  complete  en- 
joyment of  it  was  the  lurking  fear  that  there  had  been  some  tamper- 
ing vnth  the  text,  not  to  be  condoned  even  in  its  author.  But  in 
the  way  of  assumption  Charles  Mathews  the  elder  himself  could  have 
accomplished  no  more  Protean  effort.  The  lack-lustre  eye  of  Mr. 
Justice  Stareleigh,  the  forensic  hitch  of  Mr.  Serjeant  Buzfuz,  and 
the  hopeless  impotence  of  Mr.  Nathaniel  Winkle  were  alike  incom- 
parable. And  if  the  success  of  the  impersonation  of  Mr.  Samuel 
Weller  was  less  complete  —  although  Dickens  had  formerly  acted 
the  character  on  an  amateur  stage — the  reason  probably  w^as  that, 
by  reason  of  his  endless  store  of  ancient  and  modern  instances,  Sam 
had  himself  become  a  quasi-mythical  being,  whom  it  was  almost 
painful  to  find  reproduced  in  flesh  and  blood. 

I  have  not  hesitated  to  treat  these  readings  by  Dickens  as  if  they 
had  been  the  performances  of  an  actor ;  and  the  description  would 
apply  even  more  strongly  to  his  later  readings,  in  which  he  seemed 
to  make  his  points  in  a  more  accentuated  fashion  than  before. 

His  readings,"  says  Mr.  C.  Kent,  in  an  interesting  little  book 
about  them,  v/ere,  in  the  fullest  meaning  of  the  words,  singularly 
ingenious  and  highly-elaborated  histrionic  performances."  As 
such  they  had  been  prepared  with  a  care  such  as  few  actors  bestow 
upon  their  parts,  and — for  the  book  was  prepared  not  less  than 
the  reading  —  not  all  authors  bestow  upon  their  plays.  Now,  the 
art  of  reading,  even  in  the  case  of  dramatic  works,  has  its  own  laws, 
which  even  the  most  brilliant  readers  cannot  neglect  except  at  their 
peril.  A  proper  pitch  has  to  be  found,  in  the  first  instance,  before 
the  exceptional  passages  can  be,  as  it  were,  marked  off  from  it ;  and 
the  absence  of  this  ground-tone  sometimes  interfered  with  the  total 
effect  of  a  reading  by  Dickens.    On  the  other  hand,  the  exceptional 


DICKENS. 


95 


passages  were,  if  not  uniformly,  at  least  generally  excellent ;  nor  am 
I  at  all  disposed  to  agree  with  Forster  in  preferring,  as  a  rule,  the 
humorous  to  the  pathetic.  At  the  same  time,  there  was  noticeable 
in  these  readings  a  certain  hardness  which  competent  critics  likewise 
discerned  in  Dickens's  acting,  and  which  could  not,  at  least  in  the 
former  case,  be  regarded  as  an  ordinary  characteristic  of  dilettante- 
ism.  The  truth  is  that  he  isolated  his  parts  too  sharply  —  a  fre- 
quent fault  of  English  acting,  and  one  more  detrimental  to  the  total 
effect  of  a  reading  than  even  to  that  of  an  acted  play. 

No  sooner  had  the  heaviest  stress  of  the  first  series  of  readings 
ceased  than  Dickens  was  once  more  at  work  upon  a  new  fiction. 
The  more  immediate  purpose  was  to  insure  a  prosperous  launch  to 
the  journal  which,  in  the  spring  of  1859,  t^^^k  the  place  of  Hoicse- 
hold  Words.  A  dispute,  painful  in  its  origin,  but  ending  in  an 
amicable  issue,  had  resulted  in  the  purchase  of  that  journal  by 
Dickens  ;  but  already  a  little  earlier  he  had  —  as  he  was  entitled  to 
do  — begun  the  new  venture  of  All  the  Year  Rounds  with  which 
Household  Words  was  afterwards  incorporated.  The  first  number, 
published  on  April  30,  contained  the  earliest  instalment  of  A  Tale 
of  Two  Cities^  which  was  completed  by  November  20  following. 

This  story  holds  a  unique  place  amongst  the  fictions  of  its  au- 
thor. Perhaps  the  most  striking  difference  between  it  and  his 
other  novels  may  seem  to  lie  in  the  all  but  entire  absence  from  it 
of  any  humour  or  attempt  at  humour ;  for  neither  the  brutalities  of 
that  '*  honest  tradesman,"  Jerry,  nor  the  laconisms  of  Miss  Pross, 
can  well  be  called  by  that  name.  Not  that  his  sources  of  humour 
were  drying  up,  even  though,  about  this  time,  he  contributed  to 
an  American  journal  a  short  romance  of  the  real  world,''  Hunted 
Down,  from  which  the  same  relief  is  again  conspicuously  absent. 
For  the  humour  of  Dickens  was  to  assert  itself  with  unmistakable 
force  in  his  next  longer  fiction,  and  was  even  before  that,  in  some 
of  his  occasional  papers,  to  give  delightful  proofs  of  its  continued 
vigour.  In  the  case  of  the  Tale  of  Two  Cities,  he  had  a  new  and 
distinct  design  in  his  mind  which  did  not,  indeed,  exclude  humour, 
but  with  which  a  liberal  indulgence  in  it  must  have  seriously  inter- 
fered. I  set  myself,"  he  writes,  *'the  little  task  of  writing  a  pic- 
turesque story,  rising  in  every  chapter  with  characters  true  to 
nature,  but  whom  the  story  itself  should  express  more  than  they 
should  express  themselves  by  dialogue.  I  mean,  in  other  words, 
that  I  fancied  a  story  of  the  incident  might  be  written,  in  place  of 
the  bestiality  that  is  written  under  that  pretence,  pounding  the 
characters  out  in  its  own  mortar,  and  beating  their  own  interests 
out  of  them."  He  therefore  renounced  his  more  usual  method  in 
favour  of  one  probably  less  congenial  to  him.  Yet,  in  his  own 
opinion  at  least,  he  succeeded  so  well  in  the  undertaking  that,  when 
the  story  was  near  its  end,  he  could  venture  to  express  a  hope  that 
it  was  the  *'best  story  he  had  written."  So  much  praise  will 
hardly  be  given  to  this  novel,  even  by  admirers  of  the  French  art  of 
telling  a  story  succinctly,  or  by  those  who  can  never  resist  a  rather 
hysterical  treatment  of  the  French  Revolution. 


96 


DICKENS, 


In  my  own  opinion,  A  Tale  of  Two  Cities  is  a  skilfully,  though 
not  perfectly,  constructed  novel,  which  needed  but  little  substantial 
alteration  in  order  to  be  converted  into  a  not  less  eifective  stage- 
play.  And  with  such  a  design  Dickens  actually  sent  the  proof- 
sheets  of  the  book  to  his  friend  Regnier,  in  the  fearful  hope  that  he 
might  approve  of  the  project  of  its  dramatisation  for  a  French  the- 
atre. Cleverly  or  clumsily  adapted,  the  tale  of  the  Revolution  and 
its  sanguinary  vengeance  was  unlikely  to  commend  itself  to  the 
Imperial  censorship ;  but  an  English  version  was,  I  believe,  after- 
wards very  fairly  successful  on  the  boards  of  the  Adelphi,  where 
Madame  Celeste  was  certainly  in  her  right  place  as  Madame  De- 
farge,  an  excellent  character  for  a  melodrama,  though  rather  weari- 
some as  she  lies  in  wait  through  half  a  novel. 

The  construction  of  this  story  is,  as  I  have  said,  skilful  but  not 
perfect.  Dickens  himself  successfully  defended  his  use  of  accident 
in  bringing  about  the  death  of  Madame  Defarge.  The  real  objec- 
tion to  the  conduct  of  this  episode,  however,  lies  in  the  inadequacy 
of  the  contrivance  for  leaving  Miss  Pross  behind  in  Paris.  Too 
much  is  also,  I  think,  made  to  turn  upon  the  three  words  **and 
their  descendants  "  —  non-essential  in  the  original  connexion  by 
which  Dr.  Manette's  written  denunciation  becomes  fatal  to  those 
he  loves.  Still,  the  general  edifice  of  the  plot  is  solid  ;  its  interest 
is,  notwithstanding  the  crowded  background,  concentrated  with 
much  skill  upon  a  small  group  of  personages ;  and  Carton's  self- 
sacrifice,  admirably  prepared  from  the  very  first,  produces  a  legiti- 
mate tragic  effect.  At  the  same  time  the  novelist's  art  vindicates 
its  own  claims.  Not  only  does  this  story  contain  several  narrative 
episodes  of  remarkable  power,  —  such  as  the  flight  from  Paris  at  the 
close,  and  the  touching  little  incident  of  the  seamstress,  told  in 
Dickens's  sweetest  pathetic  manner,  —  but  it  is  likewise  enriched 
by  some  descriptive  pictures  of  unusual  excellence :  for  instance, 
the  sketch  of  Dover  in  the  good  old  smuggling  times,  and  the 
mezzo-tint  of  the  stormy  evening  in  Soho.  Doubtless  the  increased 
mannerism  of  the  style  is  disturbing,  and  this  not  only  in  the  high- 
strung  French  scenes.  As  to  the  historical  element  in  this  novel, 
Dickens  modestly  avowed  his  wish  that  he  might  by  his  story  have 
been  able  to  add  something  to  the  popular  and  picturesque  means 
of  understanding  that  terrible  time,  though  no  one  can  hope  to  add 
anything  to  Mr.  Carlyle's  wonderful  book.''  But  if  Dickens  desired 
to  depict  the  noble  of  the  aiicien  I'cginie^  either  according  to  Carlyle 
or  according  to  intrinsic  probability,  he  should  not  have  offered,  in 
his  Marquis,  a  type  historically  questionable,  and  unnatural  besides. 
The  description  of  the  Saint  Antoine,  before  and  during  the  burst- 
ing of  the  storm,  has  in  it  more  of  truthfulness,  or  of  the  semblance 
of  truthfulness ;  and  Dickens's  perception  of  the  physiognomy  of 
the  French  workman  is,  I  think,  remarkably  accurate.  Altogether, 
the  book  is  an  extraordinary  tour  de  fofce^  which  Dickens  never 
repeated. 

The  opening  of  a  new  story  by  Dickens  gave  the  necessary  impe- 
tus to  his  new  journal  at  its  earliest  stage  ;  nor  was  the  ground  thus 


DICKENS. 


97 


gained  ever  lost.  Mr.  W.  H.  Wills  stood  by  his  chief's  side  as  of 
old,  taking,  more  especially  in  later  years,  no  small  share  of  respon- 
sibility upon  him.  The  prospectus  oi  All  the  Year  Rowid  had  not 
in  vain  promised  an  identity  of  principle  in  its  conduct  with  that  of 
its  predecessor ;  in  energy  and  spirit  it  showed  no  falling  off ;  and, 
though  not  in  all  respects,  the  personality  of  Dickens  made  itself 
felt  as  distinctly  as  ever.  Besides  the  Tale  of  Two  Cities  he 
contributed  to  it  his  story  of  Great  Expectations.  Amongst  his 
contributors  Mr.  Wilkie  Collins  took  away  the  breath  of  multitudes 
of  readers ;  Mr.  Charles  Reade  disported  himself  amongst  the  facts 
which  gave  stamina  to  his  fiction ;  and  Lord  Lytton  made  a  daring 
voyage  into  a  mysterious  country.  Thither  Dickens  followed  him, 
for  once,  in  his  Foicr  Stories,  not  otherwise  noteworthy,  and  writ- 
ten in  a  manner  already  difficult  to  discriminate  from  that  of  I\lr. 
Wilkie  Collins.  For  the  rest,  the  advice  with  which  Dickens  aided 
Lord  Lytton's  progress  in  his  Strange  Story  was  neither  more 
ready  nor  more  painstaking  than  that  which  he  bestowed  upon  his 
younger  contributors,  to  more  than  one  of  whom  he  generously 
gave  the  opportunity  of  publishing  in  his  journal  a  long  work  of 
fiction.  Some  of  these  younger  writers  were  at  this  period  amongst 
his  most  frequent  guests  and  associates ;  for  nothing  more  natu- 
rally commended  itself  to  him  than  the  encouragement  of  the 
younger  generation. 

But  though  longer  imaginative  works  pla3'ed  at  least  as  con- 
spicuous a  part  in  the  new  journal  as  they  had  in  the  old,  the 
conductor  likewise  continued  to  make  manifest  his  intention  that 
the  lesser  contributions  should  not  be  treated  by  readers  or  by 
writers  as  harmless  necessary  padding. For  this  purpose  it  was 
requisite  not  only  that  the  choice  of  subjects  should  be  made  with 
the  utmost  care,  but  also  that  the  master's  hand  should  itself  be 
occasionally  visible.  Dickens^s  occasional  contributions  had  been 
few  and  unimportant,  till  in  a  happy  hour  he  began  a  series  of 
papers,  including  many  of  the  pleasantest,  as  well  as  of  the  mellow- 
est, amongst  the  lighter  productions  of  his  pen.  As  usual,  he  had 
taken  care  to  find  for  this  series  a  name  w^hich  of  itself  went  far  to 
make  its  fortune. 

"  I  am  both  a  town  and  a  country  traveller,  and  am  always  on  the  road. 
Figuratively  speaking,  I  travel  for  the  great  house  of  Human  Interest  Brothers, 
and  have  rather  a  large  connexion  in  the  fancy  goods  way.  Literally  speaking, 
I  am  always  wandering  here  and  there  from  my  rooms  in  Covent  Garden,  Lon- 
don—  now  about  th.e  city  streets,  now  about  the  ccnmtry  by-roads,  seeing  many 
little  things,  and  some  great  things,  which,  because  they  interest  me,  I  tliink 
may  interest  others." 

The  whole  collection  of  these  Uncommercial  Traveller  papers, 
together  with  the  Uncommercial  Samples  which  succeeded  them 
after  Dickens's  return  from  America,  and  which  begin  with  a 
graphic  account  of  his  homeward  voyage  Aboard  Ship,  where  the 
voice  of  conscience  spoke  in  the  motion  of  the  screw,  amounts  to 
thirty-seven  articles,  and  spreads  over  a  period  of  nine  years. 


98 


DICKENS. 


They  are  necessarily  of  varying  merit,  but  amongst  them  are  some 
which  deserve  a  permanent  place  in  our  lighter  literature.  Such 
are  the  description  of  the  church-yards  on  a  quiet  evening  in  The 
City  of  the  Abse?it,  the  grotesque  picture  of  loneliness  in  Cha?nbers^ 
—  a  favourite  theme  with  Dickens,  —  and  the  admirable  papers  on 
Shy  A^eighbourJioods  and  on  Tra7nps.  Others  have  a  biographical 
interest,  though  delightfully  objective  in  treatment ;  yet  others  are 
mere  fugitive  pieces ;  but  there  are  few  without  some  of  the  most 
attractive  qualities  of  Dickens's  easiest  style. 

Dickens  contributed  other  occasional  papers  to  his  journal, 
some  of  which  may  be  forgotten  without  injury  to  his  fame. 
Amongst  these  may  be  reckoned  the  rather  dreary  George  Silver- 
Diafi's  Explanation  (1868),  in  which  there  is  nothing  characteristic 
but  a  vivid  picture  of  a  set  of  ranters,  led  by  a  clique  of  scoundrels  ; 
on  the  other  hand,  there  will  always  be  admirers  of  the  pretty 
Holiday  Romance,  published  nearly  simultaneously  in  America  and 
England,  a  nosegay  of  tales  told  by  children,  the  only  fault  of 
which  is  that,  as  with  other  children's  nosegays,  there  is  perhaps  a 
little  too  much  of  it.  I  have  no  room  for  helping  to  rescue  from 
partial  oblivion  an  old  friend,  whose  portrait  has  not,  I  think,  found 
a  home  amongst  his  master's  collected  sketches.  Pincher's  coun- 
terfeit has  gone  astray,  like  Pincher  himself.  Meanwhile,  the 
special  institution  of  the  Christmas  number  flourished  in  connexion 
with  All  the  Year  Roimd  down  to  the  year  1867,  as  it  had  during 
the  last  five  years  of  Household  Words.  It  consisted,  with  the 
exception  of  the  very  last  number,  of  a  series  of  short  stories,  in  a 
framework  of  the  editor's  own  devising.  To  the  authors  of  the 
stories,  of  which  he  invariably  himself  wrote  one  or  more,  he  left 
the  utmost  liberty,  at  times  stipulating  for  nothing  but  that  tone 
of  cheerful  philanthropy  which  he  had  domesticated  in  his  journal. 
In  the  Christmas  numbers,  which  gradually  attained  to  such  a 
popularity  that  of  one  of  the  last  something  like  a  quarter  of  a  mil- 
lion copies  were  sold,  Dickens  himself  shone  most  conspicuously 
in  the  introductory  sections ;  and  some  of  these  are  to  be  reckoned 
amongst  his  very  best  descriptive  character-sketches.  Already  in 
Household  Words  Christmas  numbers,  the  introductory  sketch  of 
the  Seven  Poor  Travellers  from  Watt's  Charity  at  supper  in  the 
Rochester  hostlery,  and  the  excellent  description  of  a  winter  jour- 
ney and  sojourn  at  the  Holly  Tree  Inn,  with  an  excursus  on  inns 
in  general,  had  become  widely  popular.  The  All  the  Year  Round 
numbers,  however,  largely  augmented  this  success.  After  Tom 
Tiddler'' s  Ground,  with  the  adventures  of  Miss  Kitty  Kimmeens,  a 
pretty  little  morality  in  miniature,  teaching  the  same  lesson  as  the 
vagaries  of  Mr.  Mopes  the  hermit,  came  Somebody^ s  Luggage,  with 
its  exhaustive  disquisition  on  waiters ;  and  then  the  memorable 
chirpings  of  Mrs.  Lirriper,  in  both  Lodgings  and  Legacy,  admir- 
able in  the  delicacy  of  their  pathos,  and  including  an  inimitable 
picture  of  London  lodging-house  life.  Then  followed  the  Prescrip- 
tions of  Dr.  Marigold,  the  eloquent  and  sarcastic  but  tender-hearted 
Cheap  Jack ;  and  Mugby  function,  which  gave  words  to  the  cry  of 


DICKENS, 


99 


a  whole  nation  of  hungry  and  thirsty  travellers.  In  the  tales  and 
sketches  contributed  by  him  to  the  Christmas  numbers,  in  addition 
to  these  introductions,  he  at  times  gave  the  rein  to  liis  love  for  the 
fanciful  and  the  grotesque,  which  there  was  here  no  reason  to  keep 
under.  On  the  whole,  written,  as  in  a  sense  these  compositions 
were,  to  order,  nothing  is  more  astonishing  in  them  than  his  con- 
tinued freshness,  against  which  his  mannerism  is  here  of  vanishing 
importance ;  and,  inasmuch  as  after  issuing  a  last  Christmas  num- 
ber of  a  different  kind,  Dickens  abandoned  the  custom  when  it  had 
reached  the  height  of  popular  favour,  and  when  manifold  imitations 
had  offered  him  the  homage  of  their  flattery,  he  may  be  said  to  have 
withdrawn  from  this  campaign  in  his  literary  life  with  banners 
flying. 

"  In  the  year  1859  Dickens's  readings  had  been  comparatively  few  ; 
and  they  had  ceased  altogether  in  the  following  year,  when  the 
Uftcommercial  Traveller  began  his  wanderings.  The  winter  from 
1859  to  i860  was  his  last  winter  at  Tavistock  House;  and,  with 
the  exception  of  his  rooms  in  Wellington  Street,  he  had  now  no 
settled  residence  but  Gad^s  Hill  Place.  He  sought  its  pleasant 
retreat  about  the  beginning  of  June,  after  the  new  experience  of 
an  attack  of  rheumatism  had  made  him  recognise  the  necessity 
of  country  training  all  through  the  summer."  Yet  such  was 
the  recuperative  power,  or  the  indomitable  self-confidence,  of  his 
nature,  that  after  he  had  in  these  summer  months  contributed 
some  of  the  most  delightful  Uncojjimercial  Traveller  papers  to 
his  journal,  we  find  him  already  in  August  *' prowling  about, 
meditating  a  new  book." 

It  is  refreshing  to  think  of  Dickens  in  this  pleasant  interval  of 
country  life,  before  he  had  rushed  once  more  into  the  excitement 
of  his  labours  as  a  public  reader.  We  may  picture  him  to  our- 
selves, accompanied  by  his  dogs,  striding  along  the  country  roads 
and  lanes,  exploring  the  haunts  of  the  country  tramps,  a  piece  of 
Kentish  road,"  for  instance,  bordered  on  either  side  by  a  wood, 
and  having  on  one  hand,  between  the  road-dust  and  the  trees,  a 
skirting  patch  of  grass.  Wild  flowers  grow  in  abundance  on  this 
spot,  and  it  lies  high  and  airy,  with  a  distant  river  stealing  steadily 
away  to  the  ocean  like  a  man^s  life.  To  gain  the  mile-stone  here, 
which  the  moss,  primroses,  violets,  bluebells,  and  wild  roses  would 
soon  render  illegible  but  for  peering  travellers  pushing  them  aside 
with  their  sticks,  you  must  come  up  a  steep  hill,  come  which  way 
you  may."  At  the  foot  of  that  hill,  I  fancy,  lay  Dullborough  town 
half  asleep  in  the  summer  afternoon  ;  and  the  river  in  the  distance 
was  that  which  bounded  the  horizon  of  a  little  boy^s  vision  "w^hose 
father's  family  name  was  Pirrip,  and  whose  Christian  name  was 
Philip,  but  whose  infant  tongue  could  make  of  both  names  nothing 
longer  or  more  explicit  than  Pip." 

The  story  of  Pip's  adventures,  the  novel  of  Great  Expect atiojis, 
was  thought  over  in  these  Kentish  perambulations  between  Thames 
and  Medway,  along  the  road  which  runs,  apparently  with  the  inten- 
tion of  running  out  to  sea,  from  Hingham  towards  the  marshes ; 


100 


DICKENS. 


in  the  lonely  churchyard  of  Coolmg  village  by  the  thirteen  little 
stone-lozenges,  of  which  Pip  counted  only  five,  now  nearly  buried 
in  their  turn  by  the  rank  grass  ;  and  in  quiet  saunters  through  the 
familiar  streets  of  Rochester,  past  the  queer"  Town-hall;  and 
through  the  Vines,"  past  the  fine  old  Restoration  House,  called 
in  the  book  (by  the  name  of  an  altogether  different  edifice)  Satis 
House.  And  the  climax  of  the  narrative  was  elaborated  on  a 
unique  steamboat  excursion  from  London  to  the  mouth  of  the 
Thames,  broken  by  a  night  at  the  *'Ship  and  Lobster,"  an  old 
riverside  inn  called  The  Ship"  in  the  story.  No  wonder  that 
Dickens's  descriptive  genius  should  become  refreshed  by  these 
studies  of  his  subject,  and  that  thus  Great  Expectations  should 
have  indisputably  become  one  of  tl^e  most  picturesque  of  his  books. 
But  it  is  something  very  much  more  at  the  same  time.  The  Tale  of 
Two  Cities  had  as  a  story  strongly  seized  upon  the  attention  of  the 
reader.  But  in  the  earlier  chapters  of  Great  Expectatiojis  every 
one  felt  that  Dickens  was  himself  again.  Since  the  Yarmouth 
scenes  in  David  Copper  field  he  had  written  nothing  in  v/hich 
description  married  itself  to  sentiment  so  humorously  and  so 
tenderly.  Uncouth,  and  slow,  and  straightforward,  and  gentle  of 
heart,  like  Mr.  Peggotty,  Joe  Gargery  is  as  new  a  conception  as  he 
is  a  genuinely  true  one  ;  nor  is  it  easy  to  know  under  what  aspect 
to  relish  him  most  —  whether  disconsolate  in  his  Sunday  clothes, 
like  some  extraordinary  bird,  standing,  as  he  did,  speechless,  with 
his  tuft  of  feathers  ruffled,  and  his  mouth  open  as  if  he  wanted  a 
worm,"  or  at  home  by  his  own  fireside,  winking  at  his  little  com- 
rade, and,  when  caught  in  the  act  by  his  wife,  drawing  the  back 
of  his  hand  across  his  nose  with  his  usual  conciliatory  air  on  such 
occasions."  Nor  since  David  Coppeijield  had  Dickens  again 
shown  such  an  insight  as  he  showed  here  into  the  world  of  a  child's 
mind.  *'To  be  quite  sure,"  he  wrote  to  Forster,  *' I  had  fallen 
into  no  unconscious  repetitions,  I  read  David  Copperfield  again 
the  other  day,  and  was  affected  by  it  to  a  degree  you  would  hardly 
believe."  His  fears  were  unnecessary ;  for  with  all  its  charm  the 
history  of  Pip  lacks  the  personal  element  which  insures  our  sym- 
pathy to  the  earher  story  and  to  its  hero.  In  delicacy  of  feeling, 
however,  as  well  as  in  humour  of  description,  nothing  in  Dickens 
surpasses  the  earlier  chapters  of  Great  Expectations  j  and  equally 
excellent  is  the  narrative  of  Pip's  disloyalty  of  heart  toward  his  early 
friends,  down  to  his  departure  from  the  forge,  a  picture  of  pitiable 
selfishness  almost  Rousseau-like  in  its  fidelity  to  poor  human 
nature ;  down  to  his  comic  humiliation,  when  in  the  pride  of  his 
new  position  and  his  new  clothes,  before  that  unlimited  miscreant, 
Trabb's  boy."  The  latter  and  especially  the  concluding  portions 
of  this  novel  contain  much  that  is  equal  in  power  to  its  opening ; 
but  it  must  be  allowed  that,  before  many  chapters  have  ended,  a 
false  tone  finds  its  way  into  the  story.  The  whole  history  of  Miss 
Havisham,  and  the  crew  of  relations  round  the  unfortunate  creature, 
is  strained  and  unnatural,  and  Estella's  hardness  is  as  repulsive  as 
that  of  Edith  Dombey  herself.    Mr.  Jaggers  and  his  house-keeper, 


DICKENS. 


lOI 


and  even  Mr.  Wemmick,  have  an  element  of  artificiality  in  them, 
whilst  about  the  Pocket  family  there  is  little,  if  anything  at  all,  that 
is  real.  The  story,  however,  seems  to  recover  itself  as  the  main 
thread  in  its  deftly  woven  texture  is  brought  forward  again:  when 
on  a  dark,  gusty  night,  ominous  of  coming  trouble,  the  catas- 
trophe of  Pip's  expectations  announces  itself  in  the  return  from 
abroad  of  his  unknown  benefactor,  the  convict  whom  he  had  as  a 
child  fed  on  the  marshes.  The  remainder  of  the  narrative  is  suc- 
cessful in  conveying  to  the  render  the  sense  of  sickening  anxiety 
which  fills  the  hero ;  the  interest  is  skilfully  sustained  by  the  intro- 
duction of  a  very  strong  situation  —  Pip's  narrow  escape  out  of  the 
clutches  of  '*  Old  Orlick"  in  the  lime-kiln  on  the  marshes;  and  the 
climax  is  reached  in  the  admirably  executed  narrative  of  the  con- 
vict's attempt,  with  the  aid  of  Pip,  to  escape  by  the  river.  The 
actual  winding-up  of  Great  Expectations  is  not  altogether  satisfac- 
tory ;  but  on  the  whole  the  book  must  be  ranked  among  the  very 
best  of  Dickens's  later  novels,  as  combining,  with  the  closer  con- 
struction and  intenser  narrative  force  common  to  several  of  these, 
not  a  little  of  the  delightfully  genial  humour  of  his  earlier  works. 

Already,  before  G?'eat  Expectations  was  completely  published, 
Dickens  had  given  a  few  readings  at  the  St.  James's  Hall,  and  by 
the  end  of  October  in  the  same  year,  1861,  he  was  once  more 
engaged  in  a  full  course  of  country  readings.  They  occupied 
him  till  the  following  January,  only  ten  days  being  left  for  his 
Christmas  number,  and  a  brief  holiday  for  Christmas  itself ;  so 
close  was  the  adjustment  of  time  and  work  by  this  favourite  of 
fortune.  The  death  of  his  faithful  Arthur  Smith  befell  most  un- 
towardly  before  the  country  readings  were  begun,  but  their  success 
was  unbroken,  from  Scotland  to  South  Devon.  The  long-contem- 
plated extract  from  Copperfield  had  at  last  been  added  to  the  list  — 
a  self-sacrifice  cor  ant  publico,  hallowed  by  success — and  another 
from  Nicholas  Nickleby,  which  "  v/ent  in  the  wildest  manner." 
He  was,  however,  nearly  worn  out  with  fatigue  before  these  winter 
readings  were  over,  and  was  glad  to  snatch  a  moment  of  repose 
before  a  short  spring  course  in  town  began.  Scarcely  was  this 
finished,  when  he  was  coquetting  in  his  mind  with  an  offer  from 
Australia,  and  had  already  proposed  to  himself  to  throw  in,  as 
a  piece  of  work  by  the  way,  a  series  of  papers  to  be  called  The  Un- 
commercial Traveller  Upside  Dow7t.  Meanwhile,  a  few  readings 
for  a  charitable  purpose  in  Paris,  and  a  short  summer  course  at  St. 
James's  Hall,  completed  this  second  series  in  the  year  1863. 

Whatever  passing  thoughts  overwork  by  day  or  sleeplessness  at 
night  may  have  occasionally  brought  with  them,  Dickens  him.self 
would  have  been  strangely  surprised,  as  no  doubt  w^ould  have  been 
the  great  body  of  a  public  to  which  he  was  by  this  time  about 
the  best  known  man  in  England,  had  he  been  warned  that  weak- 
ness and  weariness  were  not  to  be  avoided  even  by  a  nature 
endowed  with  faculties  so  splendid  and  with  an  energy  so  con- 
quering as  his.  He  seemed  to  stand  erect  in  the  strength  of 
his  matured  powers,  equal  as  of  old  to  any  task  which  he  set 


I02 


DICKENS. 


himself,  and  exulting,  though  with  less  buoyancy  of  spirit  than 
of  old,  in  the  wreaths  which  continued  to  strew  his  path.  Yet 
already  the  ranks  of  his  contemporaries  were  growing  thinner, 
while  close  to  himself  death  was  taking  away  members  of  the 
generation  before,  and  of  that  after,  his  own.  Amongst  them 
was  his  mother  —  of  whom  his  biography  and  his  works  have 
little  to  say  or  to  suggest  —  and  his  second  son.  Happy  events, 
too,  had  in  the  due  course  of  things  contracted  the  family  cir- 
cle at  Gad's  Hill.  Of  his  intimates,  he  lost,  in  1863,  Augustus 
Egg;  and  in  1864  John  Leech,  to  whose  genius  he  had  him- 
self formerly  rendered  eloquent  homage. 

A  still  older  associate,  the  great  painter  Stanfield,  survived  till 
1867.  "No  one  of  your  father's  friends,"  Dickens  then  wrote  to 
Stanfield's  son,  **can  ever  have  loved  him  more  dearly  than  I 
always  did,  or  can  have  better  known  the  worth  of  his  noble  char- 
acter." Yet  another  friend,  who,  however,  so  far  as  I  can  gather, 
had  not  at  any  time  belonged  to  Dickens's  most  familiar  circle,  had 
died  on  Christmas  Eve,  1863  —  Thackeray,  whom  it  had  for  some 
time  become  customary  to  compare  or  contrast  with  him  as  his 
natural  rival.  Yet  in  point  of  fact,  save  for  the  tenderness  which, 
as  with  all  humourists  of  the  highest  order,  was  an  important  ele- 
ment in  their  writings,  and  save  for  the  influences  of  time  and 
country  to  which  they  were  both  subject,  there  are  hardly  two  other 
amongst  our  great  humourists,  who  have  less  in  common.  Their 
unlikeness  shows  itself,  among  other  things,  in  the  use  made  by 
Thackeray  of  suggestions  which  it  is  difficult  to  believe  he  did  not 
in  the  first  instance  owe  to  Dickens.  Who  would  venture  to  call 
Captain  Costigan  a  plagiarism  from  Mr.  Snevellici,  or  to  affect  that 
Wenham  and  Wagg  were  copied  from  Pyke  and  Pluck,  or  that 
Major  Pendennis  —  whose  pardon  one  feels  inclined  to  beg  for  the 
juxtaposition  —  was  founded  upon  Major  Bagstock,  or  the  Old  Cam- 
paigner in  the  Newcomes  on  the  Old  Soldier  in  Copperfield ?  But 
that  suggestions  were  in  these  and  perhaps  in  a  few  other  instances 
derived  from  Dickens  by  Thackeray  for  some  of  his  most  masterly 
characters,  it  would,  I  think,  be  idle  to  deny.  In  any  case,  the 
style  of  these  two  great  writers  differed  as  profoundly  as  their  way 
of  looking  at  men  and  things.  Y'et  neither  of  them  lacked  a  thor- 
ough appreciation  of  the  other's  genius ;  and  it  is  pleasant  to  re- 
member that,  after  paying  in  Pendennis  a  tribute  to  the  purity  of 
Dickens's  books,  Thackeray  in  a  public  lecture  referred  to  his  sup- 
posed rival  in  a  way  which  elicited  from  the  latter  the  warmest  of 
acknowledgments.  It  cannot  be  said  that  the  memorial  words 
which,  after  Thackeray's  death,  Dickens  was  prevailed  upon  to  con- 
tribute to  the  Cornhill  Magazine  did  more  than  justice  to  the  great 
writer  whom  England  had  just  lost;  but  it  is  well  that  the  kindly 
and  unstinting  tribute  of  admiration  should  remain  on  record,  to 
contradict  any  supposition  that  a  disagreement  which  had  some 
years  previously  disturbed  the  harmony  of  their  intercourse,  and  of 
which  the  world  had,  according  to  its  wont,  made  the  most,  had 
really  estranged  two  generous  minds  from  one  another.    The  effort 


DICKENS, 


103 


which  on  this  occasion  Dickens  made  is  in  itself  a  proof  of  his  kindly 
feeling  towards  Thackeray.  Of  Talfourd  and  Landor  and  Stanfield 
he  could  write  readily  after  their  deaths,  but  he  frankly  told  Mr. 
Wilkie  Collins  that,  had  he  felt  he  could,"  he  would  most  gladly 
have  excused  himself  from  writing  the  couple  of  pages"  about 
Thackeray. 

Dickens,  it  should  be  remembered,  was  at  no  time  a  man  of  many 
friends.  The  mere  dalliance  of  friendship  was  foreign  to  one  who 
worked  so  indefatigably  in  his  hours  of  recreation  as  well  as  of  labour ; 
and  fellowship  in  work  of  one  kind  or  another  seems  to  have  been,  in 
later  years  at  all  events,  the  surest  support  to  his  intimacy.  Yet  he 
was  most  easily  drawn,  not  only  to  those  who  could  help  him,  but  to 
those  whom  he  could  help  in  congenial  pursuits  and  undertakings. 
Such  was,  no  doubt,  the  origin  of  his  friendship  in  these  later  years 
with  an  accomplished  French  actor  on  the  English  boards,  whom, 
in  a  rather  barren  period  of  our  theatrical  history,  Dickens  may  have 
been  justified  in  describing  as  far  beyond  any  one  on  our  stage," 
and  who  certainly  was  an  admirable  artist."  In  1864  Mr.  Fechter 
had  taken  the  Lyceum,  the  management  of  which  he  was  to  identify 
with  a  more  elegant  kind  of  melodrama  than  that  long  domesticated 
lower  down  the  Strand ;  and  Dickens  was  delighted  to  bestow  on 
him  counsel  frankly  sought  and  frankly  given.  As  an  author,  too, 
he  directly  associated  himself  with  the  art  of  his  friend. ^  For  I  may 
mention  here  by  anticipation  that  the  last  of  the  All  the  Year  Ro7ind 
Christmas  numbers,  the  continuous  story  of  No  Thoro7igJifare,  was 
written  by  Dickens  and  Mr.  Wilkie  Collins  in  1867,  with  a  direct 
eye  to  its  subsequent  adaptation  to  the  stage,  for  which  it  actually 
was  fitted  by  Mr.  Wilkie  Collins  in  the  following  3-ear.  The  place 
of  its  production,  the  Adelphi,  suited  the  broad  effects  and  the  rather 
conventional  comic  humour  of  the  story  and  piece.  From  America, 
Dickens  watched  the  preparation  of  the  piece  with  unflagging  inter- 
est ;  and  his  innate  and  irrepressible  genius  for  stage-management 
reveals  itself  in  the  following  passage  from  a  letter  written  by  him 
to  an  American  friend  soon  after  his  return  to  England:  A^o 
ThorougJifare  is  very  shortly  coming  out  in  Paris,  where  it  is  ncv/ 
in  active  rehearsal.  It  is  still  playing  here,  but  without  Fechter, 
who  has  been  very  ill.  He  and  Wilkie  raised  so  many  pieces  of 
stage-effect  here,  that,  unless  I  am  quite  satisfied  with  the  report,  I 
shall  go  over  and  try  my  stage-managerial  hand  at  the  Vaudeville 
Theatre.  I  particularly  want  the  drugging  and  attempted  robbery 
in  the  bedroom-scene  at  the  Swiss  Inn  to  be  done  to  the  sound  of 
a  water-fall  rising  and  falling  with  the  wind.  Although  in  the  very 
opening  of  that  scene  they  speak  of  the  water-fall,  and  listen  to  it, 
nobody  thought  of  its  mysterious  music.  I  could  make  it,  with  a 
good  stage-carpenter,  in  an  hour." 

1  One  of  the  last  things  ever  written  by  Dickens  was  a  criticism  of  M.  Fechter's  act- 
ing, intended  to  introduce  him  to  the  American  public.  A  false  report,  by-the-way, 
declared  Dickens  to  have  been  the  author  of  the  dramatic  version  of  Scott's  novel,  which 
at  Christmas,  i865-'66,  was  produced  at  the  Lyceum,  under  the  title  of  The  Master  of 
Ravejiswood ;  but  he  allowed  that  he  had  done  "  a  great  deal  towards  and  about  the  piece, 
having  an  earnest  desire  to  put  Scott,  for  once,  on  the  stage  in  his  own  gallant  manner." 


104 


DICKENS. 


Great  Expectations  had  been  finished  in  i860,  and  already  in  the 
latter  part  of  1861,  the  year  which  comprised  the  main  portion  of 
his  second  series  of  readings,  he  had  been  thinking  of  a  new  story. 
He  had  even  found  a  title,  —  the  unlucky  title  which  he  afterwards 
adopted,  —  but  in  1862  the  tempting  Australian  invitation  had  been 
a  serious  obstacle  in  his  way.  I  can  force  myself  to  go  aboard  a 
ship,  and  I  can  force  myself  to  do  at  that  reading-desk  what  I  have 
done  a  hundred  times  ;  but  whether,  with  all  this  unsettled,  fluctuat- 
ing distress  in  my  mind,  I  could  force  an  original  book  out  of  it  is 
another  question."  Nor  was  it  the  "  unsettled,  fluctuating  distress  " 
which  made  it  a  serious  effort  for  him  to  attempt  another  longer  fic- 
tion. Dickens  shared  with  most  writers  the  experience  that  both 
the  inventive  power  and  the  elasticity  of  memory  decline  with 
advancing  years.  Already  since  the  time  when  he  was  thinking  of 
writing  Little  Dorrit  it  had  become  his  habit  to  enter  in  a  book  kept 
for  the  purpose  memoranda  for  possible  future  use,  hints  for  subjects 
of  stories,!  scenes,  situations,  and  characters ;  thoughts  and  fancies 
of  all  kinds;  titles  for  possible  books.  Of  these  Somebody's  L7ig- 
gage,  Our  Mutual  Fi'iend,  and  No  Thoroughfare  —  the  last  an  old 
fancy  revived  —  came  to  honourable  use  ;  as  did  many  names,  both 
Christian  and  surnames,  and  combinations  of  both.  Thus,  Bradley 
Headstone's  prce7t077ie7i  was  derived  directly  from  the  lists  of  the 
Education  Department,  and  the  Lammles  and  the  Stiltstalkings, 
with  Mr.  Merdle  and  the  Dorrits,  existed  as  names  before  the  char- 
acters were  fitted  to  them.  All  this,  though  no  doubt  in  part  attribu- 
table to  the  playful  readiness  of  an  observation  never  to  be  caught 
asleep,  points  in  the  direction  of  a  desire  to  be  securely  provided 
with  an  armoury  of  which,  in  earlier  days,  he  would  have  taken  slight 
thought. 

Gradually  —  indeed,  so  far  as  I  know,  more  gradually  than  in  the 
case  of  any  other  of  his  stories  —  he  had  built  up  the  tale  for  which 
he  had  determined  on  the  title  of  O^tr  MiUual  Frie7id^  and  slowly, 
and  without  his  old  self-confidence,  he  had,  in  the  latter  part  of 
1863,  set  to  work  upon  it.  I  want  to  prepare  it  for  the  spring, 
but  I  am  determined  not  to  begin  to  publish  with  less  than  four 
numbers  done.  I  see  my  opening  perfectly,  with  the  one  main  line 
on  which  the  story  is  to  turn,  and  if  I  don't  strike  while  the  iron 
(meaning  myself)  is  hot,  I  shall  drift  off  again,  and  have  to  go 
through  all  this  uneasiness  once  more."  For,  unfortunately,  he 
had  resolved  on  returning  to  the  old  twenty-number  measure  for 
his  new  story.  Begun  with  an  effort.  Our  Mutual  F7'ie}id — the 
publication  of  which  extended  from  May,  1864,  to  November, 
1865  —  was  completed  under  difificulties,  and  difificulties  of  a  kind 
hitherto  unknown  to  Dickens.  In  February,  1865,  as  an  immediate 
consequence,  perhaps,  of  exposure  at  a  time  when  depression  of 
spirits  rendered  him  less  able  than  usual  to  bear  it,  he  had  a  severe 
attack  of  illness,  of  which  Forster  says  that  it  **put  a  broad  mark 

^  Dickens  undoubtedly  had  a  genius  for  titles.  Amongst  some  which  he  suggested  for 
the  use  of  a  friend  and  contributor  to  his  journal  are  '*  What  will  he  do  with  it  ?  "  and 
*'  Can  he  forgive  her  ?  " 


DICKENS. 


between  his  past  life  and  what  remained  to  him  of  the  future." 
From  this  time  forward  he  felt  a  lameness  in  his  left  foot,  which 
continued  to  trouble  him  at  intervals  during  the  remainder  of  his 
life,  and  which  finally  communicated  itself  to  the  left  hand.  A  com- 
parison of  times,  however,  convinced  Forster  that  the  real  origin 
of  this  ailment  was  to  be  sought  in  general  causes. 

In  1865,  as  the  year  wore  on,  and  the  pressure  of  the  novel  still 
continued,  he  felt  that  he  was  *' working  himself  into  a  damaged 
state,"  and  was  near  to  that  which  has  greater  terrors  for  natures 
like  his  than  for  more  placid  temperaments  —  breaking  down.  So, 
in  May,  he  went  first  to  the  sea-side  and  then  to  France.  On  his 
return  (it  was  the  9th  of  June,  the  date  of  his  death  five  years  after- 
wards) he  was  in  the  railway  train  which  met  with  a  fearful  accident 
at  Staplehurst,  in  Kent.  His  carriage  was  the  only  passenger-car- 
riage in  the  train  which,  when  the  bridge  gave  way,  was  not  thrown 
over  into  the  stream.  He  was  able  to  escape  out  of  the  window, 
to  make  his  way  in  again  for  his  brandy-flask  and  the  MS.  of  a 
number  of  Oiir  Muttuil  Friend  which  he  had  left  behind  him,  to 
clamber  down  the  brickwork  of  the  bridge  for  water,  to  do  what  he 
could  towards  rescuing  his  unfortunate  fellow-travellers,  and  to  aid 
the  wounded  and  the  dying.  I  have,"  he  wrote,  in  describing  the 
scene,  a  —  I  don't  know  what  to  call  it  —  constitutional,  I  suppose, 
presence  of  mind,  and  was  not  in  the  least  fluttered  at  the  time. 
.  .  .  But  in  writing  these  scanty  words  of  recollection  I  feel  the 
shake,  and  am  obliged  to  stop."  Nineteen  months  afterwards, 
when  on  a  hurried  reading  tour  in  the  North,  he  complains  to  Miss 
Hogarth  of  the  effect  of  the  railway  shaking,  which,  since  the 
Staplehurst  accident,  '*  tells  more  and  more."  It  is  clear  how  seri- 
ous a  shock  the  accident  had  caused.  He  never,  Miss  Hogarth 
thinks,  quite  recovered  it.  Yet  it  might  have  acted  less  disastrously 
upon  a  system  not  already  nervously  weakened.  As  evidence  of 
the  decline  of  Dickens's  nervous  power,  I  hardly  know  whether  it  is 
safe  to  refer  to  the  gradual  change  in  his  handwriting,  which  in  his 
last  years  is  a  melancholy  study. 

All  these  circumstances  should  be  taken  into  account  in  judging 
of  Dickens's  last  completed  novel.  The  author  would  not  have  been 
himself  had  he,  when  once  fairly  engaged  upon  his  work,  failed  to 
feel  something  of  his  old  self-confidence.  Nor  was  this  feeling, 
which  he  frankly  confessed  to  Mr.  Wilkie  Collins,  altogether  un- 
warranted. Our  Mutual  FriencP  is,  like  the  rest  of  Dickens's  later 
writings,  carefully  and  skilfully  put  together  as  a  story.  No  excep- 
tion is  to  be  taken  to  it  on  the  ground  that  the  identity  on  which 
much  of  the  plot  hinges  is  long  foreseen  by  the  reader;  for  this,  as 
Dickens  told  his  critics  in  his  postscript,  had  been  part  of  his  design, 
and  was,  in  fact,  considering  the  general  nature  of  the  story,  almost 
indispensable.    The  defect  rather  lies  in  the  absence  of  that  element 

^  This  title  has  helped  to  extinguish  the  phrase  of  which  it  consists.  Few  would  now 
be  found  to  agree  with  the  last  clause  of  Flora's  parenthesis  in  Little  Dorrit:  "Our 
mutual  friend  — too  cold  a  word  for  me;  at  least  I  don't  mean  that  very  proper  expres- 
sion, mutual  friend." 


io6 


DICKENS. 


of  uncertainty  which  is  needed  in  order  to  sustain  the  interest. 
The  story  is,  no  doubt,  ingeniously  enough  constructed,  but  admi- 
ration of  an  ingenious  construction  is  insufficient  to  occupy  the  mind 
of  a  reader  through  an  inevitable  disentanglement.  Moreover,  some 
of  the  machinery,  though  cleverly  contrived,  cannot  be  said  to  work 
easily.  Thus,  the  r2ise  of  the  excellent  Boffin  in  playing  the  part  of 
a  skinflint  might  pass  as  a  momentary  device,  but  its  inherent  im- 
probability, together  with  the  likelihood  of  its  leading  to  an  un- 
toward result,  makes  its  protraction  undeniably  tedious.  It  is  not, 
however,  in  my  opinion  at  least,  in  the  matter  of  construction  that 
Our  Mutual  Friend  presents  a  painful  contrast  with  earlier  works 
produced,  like  it,  on  a  large  canvas."  The  conduct  of  the  story 
as  a  whole  is  fully  vigorous  enough  to  enchain  the  attention  ;  and 
in  portions  of  it  the  hand  of  the  master  displays  its  unique  power. 
He  is  at  his  best  in  the  whole  of  the  water-side  scenes,  both  where 
The  Six  Jolly  Fellowship  Porters"(identified  by  zealous  discoverers 
with  a  tavern  called  "  The  Two  Brewers")  lies  like  an  oasis  in  the 
midst  of  a  desert  of  ill-favoured  tidal  deposits,  and  where  Rogue 
Riderhood  has  his  lair  at  the  lock  higher  up  the  river.  A  marvel- 
lous union  of  observation  and  imagination  was  needed  for  the  pictur- 
ing of  a  world  in  which  this  amphibious  monster  has  his  being ;  and 
never  did  Dickens^s  inexhaustible  knowledge  of  the  physiognomy  of 
the  Thames  and  its  banks  stand  him  in  better  stead  than  in  these 
powerful  episodes.  It  is  unfortunate,  though  in  accordance  with 
the  common  fate  of  heroes  and  heroines,  that  Lizzie  Hexham  should, 
from  the  outset,  have  to  discard  the  colouring  of  her  surroundings, 
and  to  talk  the  conventional  dialect  as  well  as  express  the  conven- 
tional sentiments  of  the  heroic  world.  Only  at  the  height  of  the 
action  she  ceases  to  be  comrrionplace,  and  becomes  entitled  to  be 
remembered  amongst  the  true  heroines  of  fiction.  A  more  unusual 
figure,  of  the  half-pathetic,  half-grotesque  kind  for  which  Dickens 
had  a  peculiar  liking,  is  Lizzie^s  friend,  the  dolPs  dressmaker,  into 
whom  he  has  certainly  infused  an  element  of  genuine  sentiment ; 
her  protector,  Riah,  on  the  contrary,  is  a  mere  stage-saint,  though 
by  this  character  Dickens  appears  to  have  actually  hoped  to  redeem 
the  aspersions  he  was  supposed  to  have  cast  upon  the  Jews,  as  if 
Riah  could  have  redeemed  Fagin,  any  more  than  Sheva  redeemed 
Shylock. 

But  in  this  book  whole  episodes  and  parts  of  the  plot  through 
which  the  mystery  of  John  Harmon  winds  its  length  along  are 
ill-adapted  for  giving  pleasure  to  any  reader.  The  whole  Boffin, 
Wegg,  and  Venus  business  —  if  the  term  may  pass  —  is  extremely 
wearisome ;  the  character  of  Mr.  Venus,  in  particular,  seems  alto- 
gether unconnected  or  unarticulated  with  the  general  plot,  on  which, 
indeed,  it  is  but  an  accidental  excresence.  In  the  Wilfer  family 
there  are  the  outlines  of  some  figures  of  genuine  humour,  but  the 
outlines  only ;  nor  is  Bella  raised  into  the  sphere  of  the  charming 
out  of  that  of  the  pert  and  skittish.  A  more  ambitious  attempt, 
and  a  more  noteworthy  failure,  was  the  endeavour  to  give  to  the 
main  plot  of  this  novel  such  a  satiric  foil  as  the  Circumlocution 


DICKENS. 


Office  had  furnished  to  the  chief  action  of  Little  Dofrit,  in  a  cari- 
cature of  society  at  large,  its  surface  varnish  and  its  internal  rotten- 
ness. The  Barnacles,  and  those  v/ho  deemed  it  their  duty  to  rally 
round  the  Barnacles,  had,  we  saw,  felt  themselves  hard  hit ;  but 
what  sphere  or  section  of  society  could  feel  itself  specially  carica- 
tured in  the  Veneerings,  or  in  their  associates  —  the  odious  Lady 
Tippins,  the  impossibly  brutal  Podsnap,  Fascination  Fledgeby,  and 
the  Lammles,  a  couple  which  suggests  nothing  but  antimony  and 
the  Chamber  of  Horrors?  Caricature  such  as  this,  representing 
no  society  that  has  ever  in  any  part  of  the  world  pretended  to  be 
''good,""  corresponds  to  the  wild  rhetoric  of  the  superfluous  Betty 
Higden  episode  against  the  gospel  according  to  Podsnappery ; " 
but  it  is,  in  truth,  satire  from  which  both  wit  and  humour  have 
gone  out.  An  angry,  often  almost  spasmodic,  mannerism  has  to 
supply  their  place.  Amongst  the  personages  moving  in  "  society'' 
are  two  which,  as  playing  serious  parts  in  the  progress  of  the  plot, 
the  author  is  necessarily  obliged  to  seek  to  endow  with  the  flesh 
and  blood  of  real  human  beings.  Yet  it  is  precisely  in  these  —  the 
friends  Eugene  and  Mortimer  —  that,  in  the  earlier  part  of  the 
novel  at  all  events,  the  constraint  of  the  author's  style  seems  least 
relieved ;  the  dialogues  between  these  two  Templars  have  an  un- 
naturalness  about  them  as  intolerable  as  euphuism  or  the  eflemi- 
nacies  of  the  Augustan  age.  It  is  true  that,  when  the  story  reaches 
its  tragic  height,  the  character  of  Eugene  is  borne  along  with  it, 
and  his  aff'ectations  are  forgotten.  But  in  previous  parts  of  the 
book,  where  he  poses  as  a  wit,  and  is  evidently  meant  for  a  gentle- 
man, he  fails  to  make  good  his  claims  to  either  character.  Even 
the  skilfully  contrived  contrast  between  the  rivals  Eugene  Wray- 
burn  and  the  school-master,  Bradley  Headstone  —  through  whom 
and  through  whose  pupil,  Dickens,  by-the-way,  dealt  another  blow 
against  a  system  of  mental  training  founded  upon  facts  alone — fails 
to  bring  out  the  conception  of  Eugene  which  the  author  manifestly 
had  in  his  mind.  Lastly,  the  old  way  of  reconciling  dissonances 
a  marriage  which  society  "  calls  a  ines alliance — has  rarely  fur- 
nished a  lamer  ending  than  here ;  and,  had  the  unwritten  laws  of 
English  popular  fiction  permitted,  a  tragic  close  would  have  better 
accorded  with  the  sombre  hue  of  the  most  powerful  portions  of  this 
curiously  unequal  romance. 

The  effort  —  for  such  it  was  —  of  Otir  Afutual  Frie7id  had  not 
been  over  for  more  than  a  few  months,  when  Dickens  accepted  a 
proposal  for  thirty  nights'  readings  from  the  Messrs.  Chappell ;  and 
by  April,  1866,  he  was  again  hard  at  work,  flying  across  the  country 
into  Lancashire  and  Scotland,  and  back  to  his  temporary  London 
residence  in  Southwick  Place,  Hyde  Park.  In  any  man  more  capa- 
ble than  Dickens  of  controlling  the  restlessness  which  consumed 
him,  the  acceptance  of  this  offer  would  have  been  incomprehensi- 
ble ;  for  his  heart  had  been  declared  out  of  order  by  his  physician, 
and  the  patient  had  shown  himself  in  some  degree  awake  to  the 
significance  of  this  opinion.  But  the  readings  were  begun  and 
accomplished  notwithstanding,  though  not  without  warnings,  on 


io8 


DICKENS. 


which  he  insisted  on  putting  his  own  interpretation.  Sleeplessness 
a;T^gravated  fatigue,  and  stimulants  were  already  necessary  to  enable 
him  to  do  the  work  of  his  readings  without  discomfort.  Mean- 
while, some  weeks  before  they  were  finished,  he  had  been  induced 
to  enter  into  negotiations  about  a  further  engagement  to  begin  at 
the  end  of  the  year.  Time  was  to  be  left  for  the  Christmas  num- 
ber, which  this  year  could  hardly  find  its  scene  anywhere  else  than 
at  a  railway  junction ;  and  the  readings  were  not  to  extend  over 
forty  nights,  which  seem  ultimately  to  have  been  increased  to  fifty. 
This  second  series,  which  included  a  campaign  in  Ireland,  bril- 
liantly successful  despite  snow  and  rain,  and  Fenians,  was  over  in 
May.  Then  came  the  climax,  for  America  now  claimed  her  share  of 
the  great  author  for  her  public  halls  and  chapels  and  lecture-theatres  ; 
and  the  question  of  the  summer  and  autumn  were  whether  or  not 
to  follow  the  sound  of  the  distant  dollar.  It  was  closely  debated 
between  Dickens  and  his  friend  Forster  and  Wills,  and  he  describes 
himself  as  tempest-tossed "  with  doubts;  but  his  mind  had  in- 
clined in  one  direction  from  the  first,  and  the  matter  was  virtually 
decided  when  it  was  resolved  to  send  a  confidential  agent  to  make 
enquiries  on  the  spot.  Little  imported  another  and  grave  attack  in 
his  foot ;  the  trusty  Mr.  Dolby's  report  was  irresistible.  Eighty 
readings  within  half  a  year  was  the  estimated  number,  with  profits 
amounting  to  over  fifteen  thousand  pounds.  The  gains  actually 
made  were  nearly  five  thousand  pounds  in  excess  of  this  calculation. 

A  farewell  banquet,  under  the  presidency  of  Lord  Lytton,  gave 
the  favourite  author  Godspeed  on  his  journey  to  the  larger  half  of 
his  public;  on  the  9th  of  November  he  sailed  from  Liverpool,  and 
on  the  19th  landed  at  Boston.  The  voyage,  on  which,  wdth  his 
old  buoyancy,  he  had  contrived  to  make  himself  master  of  the 
modest  revels  of  the  saloon,  seems  to  have  done  him  good,  or  at 
least  to  have  made  him,  as  usual,  impatient  to  be  at  his  task. 
Barely  arrived,  he  is  found  reporting  himself  ''so  well,  that  I  am 
constantly  chafing  at  not  having  begun  to-night,  instead  of  this 
night  week.""  By  December,  however,  he  was  at  his  reading-desk, 
first  at  Boston,  where  he  met  with  the  warmest  of  welcomes,  and 
then  at  New  York,  where  there  was  a  run  upon  the  tickets, 
which  he  described  with  his  usual  excited  delight.  The  enthusiasm 
of  his  reception  by  the  American  public  must  have  been  heightened 
by  the  thought  that  it  was  now  or  never  for  them  to  see  him  face  to 
face,  and,  by-gones  being  by-gones,  to  testify  to  him  their  admira- 
tion. But  there  may  have  been  some  foundation  for  his  discovery 
that  some  signs  of  agitation  on  his  part  were  expected  in  return, 
and  '*  that  it  would  have  been  taken  as  a  suitable  compliment  if  I 
would  stagger  on  the  platform,  and  instantly  drop,  overpowered  by 
the  spectacle  before  me."  It  was  but  a  sad  Christmas  w^hich  he 
spent  with  his  faithful  Dolby  at  their  New  York  inn,  tired,  and  with 
a  genuine  American  catarrh  upon  him,"  of  which  he  never  freed 
himself  during  his  stay  in  the  country.  Hardly  had  he  left  the 
doctors  hands  than  he  was  al^out  again,  reading  in  Boston  and 
New  York  and  their  more  immediate  neighbourhood  —  that  is,  with- 


DICKENS. 


109 


in  six  or  seven  hours  by  railway  —  till  February ;  and  then,  in  order 
to  stimulate  his  public,  beginning  a  series  of  appearances  at  more 
distant  places  before  returning  to  his  starting-points.  His  whole 
tour  included,  besides  a  number  of  New  England  towns,  Philadel- 
phia, Baltimore,  and  Washington,  and  in  the  north  Cleveland  and 
Buffalo.  Canada  and  the  West  were  struck  out  of  the  programme, 
the  latter  chiefly  because  exciting  political  matters  were  beginning 
to  absorb  public  attention. 

During  these  journeyings  Dickens  gave  himself  up  altogether  to 
the  business  of  his  readings,  only  occasionally  allowing  himself  to 
accept  the  hospitality  proffered  him  on  every  side.  Thus  only 
could  he  breast  the  difficulties  of  his  enterprise ;  for,  as  I  have 
said,  his  health  was  never  good  during  the  whole  of  his  visit, 
and  his  exertions  were  severe,  though  eased  by  the  self-devotion 
of  his  attendants,  of  which,  as  of  his  constant  kindness,  both 
serious  and  sportive,  towards  them  it  is  touching  to  read.  Al- 
ready in  January  he  describes  himself  as  not  seldom  *'so  dead 
beat"  at  the  close  of  a  reading  "that  they  lay  me  down  on  a 
sofa,  after  I  have  been  washed  and  dressed,  and  I  lie  there,  ex- 
tremely faint,  for  a  quarter  of  an  hour,"  and  as  sufferino;'  from 
intolerable  sleeplessness  at  night.  His  appetite  was  equally  dis- 
ordered, and  he  lived  mainly  on  stimulants.  Why  had  he  con- 
demned himself  to  such  a  life? 

When  at  last  he  could  declare  the  stress  of  his  work  over  he 
described  himself  as  **  nearly  used  up.  Climate,  distance,  catarrh, 
travelling,  and  hard  work  have  begun  —  I  may  say  so,  now  they  are 
nearly  all  over  —  to  tell  heavily  upon  me.  Sleeplessness  besets 
me ;  and  if  I  had  engaged  to  go  on  into  May,  I  think  I  must 
have  broken  down."  Indeed,  but  for  his  wonderful  energy  and 
the  feeling  of  exultation  which  is  derived  from  a  heavy  task  nearly 
accomplished,  he  would  have  had  to  follow  the  advice  of  "Long- 
fellow and  all  the  Cambridge  men,"  and  give  in  nearly  at  the  last. 
But  he  persevered  through  the  farewell  readings,  both  at  Boston 
and  at  New  York,  though  on  the  night  before  the  last  reading 
in  America  he  told  Dolby  that  if  he  "had  to  read  but  twice  more, 
instead  of  once,  he  couldnH  do  it.  This  last  reading  of  all  was 
given  at  New  York  on  April  20,  two  days  after  a  farewell  banquet 
at  Delmonico's.  It  was  when  speaking  on  this  occasion  that,  very 
naturally  moved  by  the  unalloyed  welcome  which  had  greeted  him 
in  whatever  part  of  the  States  he  had  visited,  he  made  the  declara- 
tion already  mentioned,  promising  to  perpetuate  his  grateful  sense 
of  his  recent  American  experiences.  This  apology,  which  was  no 
apology,  at  least  remains  one  amongst  many  proofs  of  the  fact  that 
with  Dickens  kindness  never  fell  on  a  thankless  soil. 

The  merry  month  of  May  w^as  still  young  in  the  Kentish  fields 
and  lanes  when  the  master  of  Gad's  Hill  Place  was  home  again  at 
last.  "  I  had  not  been  at  sea  three  days  on  the  passage  home,"  he 
wrote  to  his  friend  Mrs.  Watson,  "when  I  became  myself  again." 
It  was,  however,  too  much  when  *'a  *  deputation'  —  two  in  number, 
of  whom  only  one  could  get  into  my  cabin,  while  the  other  looked 


I  lO 


DICKENS, 


in  at  my  window  —  came  to  ask  me  to  read  to  the  passengers  that 
evening  in  the  saloon.  I  respectfully  replied  that  sooner  than  do  it 
I  would  assault  the  captain  and  be  put  in  irons."  Alas !  he  was 
already  fast  bound,  by  an  engagement  concluded  soon  after  he  had 
arrived  in  Boston,  to  a  final  series  of  readings  at  home.  *' Fare- 
well "  is  a  difficult  word  to  say  for  any  one  who  has  grown  accus- 
tomed to  the  stimulating  excitement  of  a  public  stage,  and  it  is  not 
wonderful  that  Dickens  should  have  wished  to  see  the  faces  of  his 
familiar  friends  —  the  English  public  —  once  more.  But  the  engage- 
ment to  which  he  had  set  his  hand  was  for  a  farewell  of  a  hundred 
readings,  at  the  recompense  of  eight  thousand  pounds,  in  addition 
to  expenses  and  percentage.  It  is  true  that  he  had  done  this 
before  he  had  fully  realized  the  effect  of  his  American  exertions ; 
but  even  so  there  was  a  terrible  unwisdom  in  the  promise.  These 
last  readings  — and  he  alone  is,  in  common  fairness,  to  be  held  re- 
sponsible for  the  fact  —  cut  short  a  life  from  which  much  noble  fruit 
might  still  have  been  expected  for  our  literature,  and  which  in  any 
case  might  have  been  prolonged  as  a  blessing  beyond  all  that  gold 
can  buy  to  those 'who  loved  him. 

Meanwhile  he  had  allowed  himself  a  short  respite  before  resum- 
ing his  labours  in  October.  It  w^as  not  more,  his  friends  thought, 
than  he  needed,  for  much  of  his  old  buoyancy  seemed  to  them  to 
be  wanting  in  him,  except  when  hospitality  or  the  intercourse  of 
friendship  called  it  forth.  What  a  charm  there  still  was  in  his 
genial  humour  his  letters  would  suffice  to  show.  It  does  one  good 
to  read  his  description  to  his  kind  American  friends  Mr.  and  Mrs. 
Fields  of  his  tranquillity  at  Gad's  Hill :  *' Divers  birds  sing  here  all 
day,  and  the  nightingales  all  night.  The  place  is  lovely,  and  in 
perfect  order.  I  have  put  five  mirrors  in  the  Swiss  chdlet  v/here  I 
write,  and  they  reflect  and  refract  in  all  kinds  of  ways  the  leaves 
that  are  quivering  at  the  windows,  and  the  great  fields  of  waving 
corn,  and  the  sail-dotted  river.  My  room  is  up  amongst  the 
branches  of  the  trees,  and  the  birds  and  the  butterflies  fly  in  and 
out,  and  the  green  branches  shoot  in  at  the  open  windows,  and  the 
lights  and  shadows  of  the  clouds  come  and  go  with  the  rest  of  the 
company.  The  scent  of  the  flowers,  and  indeed  of  everything  that 
is  growing  for  miles  and  miles,  is  most  delicious." 

Part  of  this  rare  leisure  he  generously  devoted  to  the  preparation 
for  the  press  of  a  volume  of  literary  remains  from  the  pen  of  an  old 
friend.  The  Relio^ious  Opinions  of  Chauncey  Hare  Townshend 
should  not  be  altogether  overlooked  by  those  interested  in  Dickens, 
to  whom  the  loose  undogmatic  theology  of  his  friend  commended 
itself  as  readily  as  the  sincere  religious  feeling  underlying  it.  I 
cannot  say  what  answer  Dickens  would  have  returned  to  an  enquiry 
as  to  his  creed,  but  the  nature  of  his  religious  opinions  is  obvious 
enough.  Born  in  the  Church  of  England,  he  had  so  strong  an 
aversion  from  what  seemed  to  him  dogmatism  of  any  kind,  that  he 
for  a  time  —  in  1843 —  connected  himself  with  a  Unitarian  congre- 
gation ;  and  to  Unitarian  views  his  own  probably  continued  during 
his  life  most  nearly  to  approach.    He  described  himself  as  "  mor- 


DICKENS, 


I  I  I 


ally  wide  asunder  from  Rome ; "  but  the  religious  conceptions  of 
her  community  cannot  have  been  a  matter  of  anxious  enquiry  with 
him,  while  he  was  too  liberal-minded  to  be,  unless  occasionally, 
aggressive  in  his  Protestantism.  For  the  rest,  his  mind,  though 
imaginative,  was  v*dthout  mystical  tendencies,  while  for  the  transi- 
tory superstitions  of  the  day  it  was  impossible  but  that  he  should 
entertain  the  contempt  which  they  deserved.  Although,"  he 
writes  — 

"  I  regard  with  a  hushed  and  solemn  fear  the  mysteries  between  which,  and 
this  state  of  existence,  is  interposed  the  barrier  of  the  great  trial  and  change  that 
fall  on  all  the  things  that  live  ;  and,  although  I  have  not  the  audacity  to  pretend 
that  I  know  anything  of  them,  I  cannot  reconcile  the  mere  banging  of  doors, 
ringing  of  bells,  creaking  of  boards,  and  such  like  insignificances,  with  the 
majestic  beauty  and  pervading  analogy  of  all  the  Divine  rules  that  I  am  per- 
mitted to  understand." 

His  piety  was  undemonstrative  and  sincere,  as  his  books  alone 
would  suffice  to  prove ;  and  he  seems  to  have  sought  to  impress 
upon  his  children  those  religious  truths  with  the  acceptance  and 
practice  of  which  he  remained  himself  content.  He  loved  the  New 
Testament,  and  had,  after  some  fashion  of  his  own,  paraphrased 
the  Gospel  narrative  for  the  use  of  his  children ;  but  he  thought 
that  **half  the  misery  and  hypocrisy  of  the  Christian  world  arises 
from  a  stubborn  determination  to  refuse  the  New  Testament  as  a 
sufficient  guide  in  itself,  and  to  force  the  Old  Testament  into  alli- 
ance with  it  —  whereof  comes  all  manner  of  camel-swallowing  and 
of  gnat-straining."  Of  Puritanism  in  its  modern  forms  he  was  an 
uncompromising,  and  no  doubt  a  conscientious,  opponent ;  and 
though,  with  perfect  sincerity,  he  repelled  the  charge  that  his 
attacks  upon  cant  were  attacks  upon  religion,  yet  their  animus  is 
such  as  to  make  the  misinterpretation  intelligible.  His  Dissenting 
ministers  are  of  the  Bartholomeiv  Fair  species  ;  and  though,  in  his 
later  books,  a  good  clergyman  here  and  there  makes  his  modest 
appearance,  the  balance  can  hardly  be  said  to  be  satisfactorily 
redressed. 

The  performance  of  this  pious  office  was  not  the  only  kind  act  he 
did  after  his  return  from  America.  Of  course,  however,  his  own 
family  was  nearest  to  his  heart.  No  kinder  or  more  judicious  words 
were  ever  addressed  by  a  father  to  his  children  than  those  which, 
about  this  time,  he  wrote  to  one  of  his  sons,  then  beginning  a  suc- 
cessful career  at  Cambridge,  and  to  another —  the  youngest  —  who 
was  setting  forth  for  Australia,  to  join  an  elder  brother  already 
established  in  that  country.  *'  Poor  Plorn,"  he  afterward  wrote, 
*'is  gone  to  Australia.  It  was  a  hard  parting  at  the  last.  He 
seemed  to  me  to  become  once  more  my  youngest  and  favourite 
child  as  the  day  drew  near,  and  I  did  not^  think  I  could  have  been 
so  shaken." 

In  October  his  farewell"  readings  began.  He  had  never  had 
his  heart  more  in  the  work  than  now.  Curiously  enough,  not  less 
than  two  proposals  had  reached  him  during  this  autumn  —  one  from 


112 


DICKENS, 


Birmingham  and  the  other  from  Edinburgh  —  that  he  should  allow 
himself  to  be  put  forward  as  a  candidate  for  Parliament ;  but  he 
declined  to  entertain  either,  though  in  at  least  one  of  the  two  cases 
the  prospects  of  success  would  not  have  been  small.  His  views  of 
political  and  parliamentary  life  had  not  changed  since  he  had  writ- 
ten to  Bulwer  Lytton  in  1865  :  "Would  there  not  seem  to  be  some- 
thing horribly  rotten  in  the  system  of  political  life,  when  one  stands 
amazed  how  any  man,  not  forced  into  it  by  his  position,  as  you  are, 
can  bear  to  live  it?"  Indeed,  they  had  hardly  changed  since  the 
days  when  he  had  come  into  personal  contact  with  them  as  a  re- 
porter. In  public  and  in  private  he  had  never  ceased  to  ridicule 
our  English  system  of  party,  and  to  express  his  contempt  for  the 
Legislature  and  all  its  works.  He  had,  however,  continued  to  take 
a  lively  interest  in  public  affairs,  and  his  letters  contain  not  a  few 
shrewd  remarks  on  both  home  and  foreign  questions.  Like  most 
liberal  minds  of  his  age,  he  felt  a  warm  sympathy  for  the  cause  of 
Italy ;  and  the  English  statesman  whom  he  appears  to  have  most 
warmly  admired  was  Lord  Russell,  in  whose  good  intentions  neither 
friends  nor  adversaries  were  wont  to  lose  faith.  Meanwhile  his 
Radicalism  gradually  became  of  the  most  thoroughly  independent 
type,  though  it  interfered  neither  with  his  approval  of  the  proceed- 
ings in  Jamaica  as  an  example  of  strong  governm.ent,  nor  with  his 
scorn  of  "the  meeting  of  jawbones  and  asses"  held  against  Gov- 
ernor Eyre  at  Manchester.  The  political  questions,  however,  which 
really  moved  him  deeply  were  those  social  problems  to  which  his 
sympathy  for  the  poor  had  always  directed  his  attention,  —  the  Poor- 
law,  temperance,  Sunday  observance,  punishment  and  prisons, 
labour  and  strikes.  On  all  these  heads  sentiment  guided  his  judg- 
ment, but  he  spared  no  pains  to  convince  himself  that  he  was  in  the 
right ;  and  he  was  always  generous,  as  when,  notwithstanding  his 
interest  in  Household  Words,  he  declared  himself  unable  to  advo- 
cate the  repeal  of  the  paper  duty  for  a  moment,  "as  against  the 
soap  duty,  or  any  other  pressing  on  the  mass  of  the  poor." 

Thus  he  found  no  difficulty  in  adhering  to  the  course  he  had 
marked  out  for  himself.  The  subject  which  now  occupied  him 
before  all  others  was  a  scheme  for  a  new  reading,  with  which  it  was 
his  wish  to  vary  and  to  intensify  the  success  of  the  series  on  which 
he  was  engaged.  This  was  no  other  than  a  selection  of  scenes  from 
Oliver  Twist,  culminating  in  the  scene  of  the  murder  of  Nancy  by 
Sikes,  Vv^hich,  before  producing  it  in  public,  he  resolved  to  "try" 
upon  a  select  private  audience.  The  trial  was  a  brilliant  success. 
"  The  public,"  exclaimed  a  famous  actress  who  was  present,  "  have 
been  looking  out  for  a  sensation  these  last  fifty  years  or  so,  and,  by 
Heaven,  they  have  got  it!"  Accordingly,  from  January,  1869,  it 
formed  one  of  the  most  frequent  of  his  readings,  and  the  eftbrt  which 
it  involved  counted  for  much  in  the  collapse  which  was  to  follow. 
Never  were  the  limits  between  reading  and  acting  more  thoroughly 
effaced  by  Dickens,  and  never  was  the  production  of  an  extraordi- 
nary effect  more  equally  shared  by  author  and  actor.  But  few  wh.o 
witnessed  this  extraordinary  performance  can  have  guessed  the  elab- 


DJCKENS, 


orate  preparation  bestowed  upon  it,  which  is  evident  from  the 
following  notes  (by  Mr.  C.  Kent)  on  the  book  used  in  it  by  the 
reader :  — 

"  What  is  as  striking  as  anything  in  all  this  reading,  however,  —  that  is,  in  the 
reading  copy  of  it  now  lying  before  us  as  we  write,  —  is  the  mass  of  hints  as  to 
the  by-play  in  the  stage  directions  for  himself,  so  to  speak,  scattered  up  and  down 
the  margin.  *  Fagin  raised  his  right  hand,  and  shook  his  trembling  forefinger  in 
the  ail",'  is  there  on  page  loi  in  print.  Beside  it,  on  the  margin  in  MS.,  is  the 
vioxd.''  Action^  Not  a  word  of  it  was  said.  It  was  simply  ^j^c?;^*?.  Again,  imme- 
diately below  that,  on  the  same  page —  Sikes  loquitur:  '  Oh  !  you  haven't,  haven't 
you?'  passing  a  pistol  into  a  more  convenient  pocket  {^Action '  again  in  MS.  on 
the  margin.)  Not  a  word  was  said  about  the  pistol.  ...  So  again,  afterwards, 
as  a  rousing  self-direction,  one  sees  notified  in  MS.  on  page  107  the  grim  stage 
direction,  *  Murder  coming  ! ' " 

The  Murder  "  was  frequently  read  by  Dickens  not  less  than  four 
times  a  week  during  the  early  months  of  1869,  in  which  year,  after 
beginning  in  Ireland,  he  had  been  continually  travelling  to  and  fro 
between  various  parts  of  Great  Britain  and  town.  Already  in  Feb- 
ruary the  old  trouble  in  his  foot  had  made  itself  felt,  but,  as  usual, 
it  had  long  been  disregarded.  On  the  loth  of  April  he  had  been 
entertained  at  Liverpool,  in  St.  George's  Hall,  at  a  banquet  presided 
over  by  Lord  Dufferin,  and  in  a  genial  speech  had  tossed  back  the 
ball  to  Lord  Houghton,  who  had  pleasantly  bantered  him  for  his 
unconsciousness  of  the  merits  of  the  House  of  Lords.  Ten  days 
afterwards  he  was  to  read  at  Preston,  but,  feeling  uneasy  about  him- 
self, had  reported  his  symptoms  to  his  doctor  in  London.  The 
latter  hastened  down  to  Preston,  and  persuaded  Dickens  to  accom- 
pany him  back  to  town,  where,  after  a  consultation,  it  was  deter- 
mined that  the  readings  must  be  stopped  for  the  current  year,  and 
that  reading  combined  with  travelling  must  never  be  resumed. 
What  his  sister-in-law  and  daughter  feel  themselves  justified  in  call- 
ing   the  beginning  of  the  end    had  come  at  last. 

With  his  usual  presence  of  mind  Dickens  at  once  perceived  the 
imperative  necessity  of  interposing,  *'as  it  were,  a  fly-leaf  in  the 
book  of  my  life,  in  which  nothing  should  be  written  from  without 
for  a  brief  season  of  a  few  weeks."  But  he  insisted  that  the  com- 
bination of  the  reading  and  the  travelling  was  alone  to  be  held 
accountable  for  his  having  found  himself  feeling,  **  for  the  first  time 
in  my  life,  giddy,  jarred,  shaken,  faint,  uncertain  of  voice  and  sight 
and  tread  and  touch,  and  dull  of  spirit."  Meanwhile,  he  for  once 
kept  quiet,  first  in  London,  and  then  at  Gad's  Hill.  **This  last 
summer,"  say  those  who  did  most  to  make  it  bright  for  him,  '*  was 
a  very  happy  one,"  and  gladdened  by  the  visits  of  many  friends. 
On  the  retirement,  also  on  account  of  ill-health,  from  All  the  Year 
Round,  of  his  second  self,  Mr.  W.  H.  Wills,  he  was  fortunately 
able  at  once  to  supply  the  vacant  place  by  the  appointment  to  it 
of  his  eldest  son,  who  seems  to  have  inherited  that  sense  of  lucid 
order  which  was  amongst  his  father's  most  distinctive  characteris- 
tics. He  travelled  very  little  this  year,  though  in  September  he 
made  a  speech  at  Birmingham  on  behalf  of  his  favourite  Midland 


114 


DICKENS, 


Institute,  delivering  himself,  at  its  conclusion,  of  an  antithetical 
Radical  commonplace,  which,  being  misreported  or  misunderstood, 
was  commented  upon  with  much  unnecessary  wonderment.  With 
a  view  to  avoiding  the  danger  of  excessive  fatigue,  the  latter  part 
of  the  year  was  chiefly  devoted  to  writing  in  advance  part  of  his 
new  book,  which,  like  Great  Expectations^  was  to  grow  up,  and  to 
be  better  for  growing  up,  in  his  own  Kentish  home,  and  almost 
within  sound  of  the  bells  of  Cloisterham  "  Cathedral.  But  the 
new  book  was  never  to  be  finished. 

The  first  number  of  The  Mystery  of  Edwht  Drood  was  not  pub- 
lished till  one  more  short  series  of  twelve  readings,  given  in  Lon- 
don during  a  period  extending  from  January  to  March,  was  at  an 
end.  He  had  obtained  Sir  Thomas  Watson's  consent  to  his  carry- 
ing out  this  wish,  largely  caused  by  the  desire  to  compensate  the 
Messrs.  Chappell  in  some  measure  for  the  disappointment  to  which 
he  had  been  obliged  to  subject  them  by  the  interruption  of  his 
longer  engagement.  Thus,  though  the  Christmas  of  1869  had 
brought  wdth  it  another  warning  of  trouble  in  the  foot,  the  year 
1870  opened  busily,  and  early  in  January  Dickens  established  him- 
self for  the  season  at  5  Hyde  Park  Place.  Early  in  the  month  he 
made  another  speech  at  Birmingham  ;  but  the  readings  were  strictly 
confined  to  London.  On  the  other  hand,  it  was  not  to  be  expected 
that  the  Murder"  would  be  excluded  from  the  list.  It  was  read 
in  January  to  an  audience  of  actors  and  actresses  ;  and  it  is  pleasant 
to  think  that  he  was  able  to  testify  to  his  kindly  feeling  towards 
their  profession  on  one  of  the  last  occasions  when  he  appeared  on 
his  own  stage.  *'l  set  myself,"  he  wrote,  to  carrying  out  of 
themselves  and  their  observation  those  who  were  bent  on  watching 
how  the  effects  were  got ;  and,  I  beheve,  I  succeeded.  Coming 
back  to  it  again,  however,  I  feel  it  was  madness  ever  to  do  it  so 
continuously.  My  ordinary  pulse  is  seventy-two,  and  it  runs  up 
under  this  effort  to  one  hundred  and  twelve."  Yet  this  fatal  read- 
ing was  repeated  thrice  more  before  the  series  closed,  and  with 
even  more  startling  results  upon  the  reader.  The  careful  observa- 
tions made  by  the  physician,  however,  show  that  the  excitement  of 
his  last  readings  was  altogether  too  great  for  any  man  to  have  en- 
dured much  longer.  At  last,  on  March  16,  the  night  came  which 
closed  fifteen  years  of  personal  relations  between  the  English  pub- 
lic and  its  favourite  author,  such  as  are,  after  all,  unparalleled  in 
the  history  of  our  literature.  His  farewell  words  w^ere  few  and  sim- 
ple, and  referred  with  dignity  to  his  resolution  to  devote  himself 
henceforth  exclusively  to  his  calling  as  an  author,  and  to  his  hope 
that  in  but  two  short  weeks'  time  his  audience  might  enter,  in 
their  own  homes,  on  a  new  series  of  readings  at  which  his  assis- 
tance would  be  indispensable." 

Of  the  short  time  which  remained  to  him  his  last  book  was  the 
chief  occupation ;  and  an  association  thus  clings  to  the  Mystery  of 
Edwin  Drood  which  would,  in  any  case,  incline  us  to  treat  this 
fragment  —  for  it  was  to  be  no  more  —  with  tenderness.  One 
would,  indeed,  hardly  be  justified  in  asserting  that  this  story,  like 


DICKENS. 


that  which  Thackeray  left  behind  him  in  the  same  unfinished  state, 
bade  fair  to  become  a  masterpiece  in  its  author\s  later  manner; 
there  is  much  that  is  forced  in  its  humour,  while  as  to  the  working 
out  of  the  chief  characters  our  means  of  judgment  are,  of  course, 
incomplete.  The  outline  of  the  design,  on  the  other  hand,  presents 
itself  with  tolerable  clearness  to  the  minds  of  most  readers  of 
insight  or  experience,  though  the  story  deserves  its  name  of  a 
mystery,  instead  of,  like  Oicr  Mtitual  F?'iend,  seeming  merely  to 
withhold  a  necessary  explanation.  And  it  must  be  allowed  few- 
plots  have  ever  been  more  effectively  laid  than  this,  of  which  the 
untying  will  never  be  known.  Three  such  personages  in  relation 
to  a  deed  of  darkness  as  Jasper  for  its  contriver,  Durden  for  its 
unconscious  accomplice,  and  Deputy  for  its  self-invited  witness, 
and  all  so  naturally  connecting  themselves  with  the  locality  of  the 
perpetration  of  the  crime,  assuredly  could  not  have  been  brought 
together  except  by  one  who  had  gradually  attained  to  mastership 
in  the  adaptation  of  characters  to  the  purposes  of  a  plot.  Still, 
the  strongest  impression  left  upon  the  reader  of  this  fragment  is 
the  evidence  it  furnishes  of  Dickens  having  retained  to  the  last 
powers  which  were  most  peculiarly  and  distinctively  his  own. 
Having  skilfully  brought  into  connexion,  for  the  purposes  of  his 
plot,  two  such  strangely  contrasted  spheres  of  life  and  death  as 
the  cathedral  close  at  "  Cloisterham  *'  and  an  opium-smoking  den 
in  one  of  the  obscurest  corners  of  London,  he  is  enabled,  by  his 
imaginative  and  observing  powers,  not  only  to  realise  the  pictur- 
esque elements  in  both  scenes,  but  also  to  convert  them  into  a 
twofold  background,  accommodating  itself  to  the  most  vivid  hues 
of  human  passion.    This  is  to  bring  out  what  he  was  wont  to  call 

the  romantic  aspect  of  familiar  things.''  With  the  physiognomy 
of  Cloisterham,  —  otherwise  Rochester,  —  with  its  cathedral,  and 
its  monastery"  ruin,  and  its  "Minor  Canon  Corner,"  and  its 
**  Nuns'  House"  —  otherwise  "  Eastgate  House,"  in  the  High  Street 
—  he  was,  of  course,  closely  acquainted;  but  he  had  never  repro- 
duced its  features  with  so  artistic  a  cunning,  and  the  Mystery  of 
Edwin  Drood  will  always  haunt  Bishop  Gundulph's  venerable 
building  and  its  tranquil  precincts.  As  for  the  opium-smoking,  we 
have  his  own  statement  that  what  he  described  he  saw — *'  exactly 
as  he  had  described  it,  penny  ink-bottle  and  all  —  down  in  Shad- 
well"  in  the  autumn  of  1869.  *'A  couple  of  the  Inspectors  of 
Lodging-houses  knew  the  woman,  and  took  me  to  her  as  I  was 
making  a  round  with  them  to  see  for  m3'self  the  working  of  Lord 
Shaftesbury's  Bill."  Between  these  scenes  John  Jasper  —  a  figure 
conceived  with  singular  force  —  moves  to  and  fro,  preparing  his 
mysterious  design.  No  story  of  the  kind  ever  began  more  finely ; 
and  we  may  be  excused  from  enquiring  whether  signs  of  diminished 
vigour  of  invention  and  freshness  of  execution  are  to  be  found  in 
other  and  less  prominent  portions  of  the  great  novelist's  last  work. 

Before,  in  this  year  1870,  Dickens  withdrew  from  London  to 
Gad's  Hill,  with  the  hope  of  there  in  quiet  carrying  his  all  but  half- 
finished  task  to  its  close,  his  health  had  not  been  satisfactory ;  he 


ii6 


DICKENS. 


had  suffered  from  time  to  time  in  his  foot,  and  his  weary  and  aged 
look  was  observed  by  many  of  his  friends.  He  was  able  to  go 
occasionally  into  society ;  though  at  the  last  dinner-party  which  he 
attended  —  it  was  at  Lord  Houghton's,  to  meet  the  Prince  of  Wales 
and  the  King  of  the  Belgians  —  he  had  been  unable  to  mount  above 
the  dining-room  floor.  Already  in  March  the  Queen  had  found  a 
suitable  opportunity  for  inviting  him  to  wait  upon  her  at  Bucking- 
ham Palace,  when  she  had  much  gratified  him  by  her  kindly  man- 
ner: and  a  few  days  later  he  made  his  appearance  at  the  levee. 
These  acknowledgments  of  his  position  as  an  English  author  were 
as  they  should  be;  no  others  were  offered,  nor  is  it  a  matter  of 
regret  that  there  should  have  been  no  titles  to  inscribe  on  his  tomb. 
He  was  also  twice  seen  on  one  of  those  public  occasions  which  no 
eloquence  graced  so  readily  and  so  pleasantly  as  his  :  once  in  April, 
at  the  dinner  for  the  Newsvenders'  Charity,  when  he  spoke  of  the 
existence  among  his  humble  clients  of  that  feeling  of  brotherhood 
and  sympathy  which  is  worth  much  to  all  men,  or  they  would  herd 
with  wolves ;  "  and  once  in  May  —  only  a  day  or  two  before  he 
v/ent  home  into  the  country  —  when,  at  the  Royal  Academy  dinner, 
he  paid  a  touching  tribute  to  the  eminent  painter,  Daniel  Maclise, 
who  in  the  good  old  days  had  been  much  like  a  brother  to  himself. 
Another  friend  and  companion,  Mark  Lemon,  passed  away  a  day  or 
two  afterwards  ;  and  with  the  most  intimate  of  all,  his  future  biogra- 
pher, he  lamented  the  familiar  faces  of  their  companions  —  not  one 
of  whom  had  passed  his  sixtieth  year  —  upon  which  they  were  not 
to  look  again.  On  the  30th  of  May  he  was  once  more  at  Gad's 
Hill. 

Here  he  forthwith  set  to  work  on  his  book,  taking  walks  as  usual, 
though  of  no  very  great  length.  On  Thursday,  the  9th  of  June,  he 
had  intended  to  pay  his  usual  weekly  visit  to  the  office  of  his  jour- 
nal, and  accordingly,  on  the  8th,  devoted  the  afternoon  as  well  as 
the  morning  to  finishing  the  sixth  number  of  the  story.  When  he 
came  across  to  the  house  from  the  chalet  before  dinner  he  seemed 
to  his  sister-in-law,  who  alone  of  the  family  was  at  home,  tired  and 
silent,  and  no  sooner  had  they  sat  down  to  dinner  than  she  noticed 
how  seriously  ill  he  looked.  It  speedily  became  evident  that  a  fit 
was  upon  him.  Come  and  lie  down,"  she  entreated.  '*  Yes,  on 
the  ground,"  he  said,  very  distinctly,  —  these  were  the  last  words 
he  spoke,  —  and  he  slid  from  her  arm  and  fell  upon  the  floor.  He 
was  laid  on  a  couch  in  the  room,  and  there  he  remained  uncon- 
scious almost  to  the  last.  He  died  at  ten  minutes  past  six  on  the 
evening  of  the  9th  —  by  which  time  his  daughters  and  his  eldest 
son  had  been  able  to  join  the  faithful  watcher  by  his  side ;  his  sis- 
ter and  his  son  Henry  arrived  when  all  was  over. 

His  own  desire  had  been  to  be  buried  near  Gad's  Hill ;  though 
at  one  time  he  is  said  to  have  expressed  a  wish  to  lie  in  a  disused 
graveyard,  which  is  still  pointed  out,  in  a  secluded  corner  in  the 
moat  of  Rochester  Castle.  Preparations  had  been  made  accord- 
ingly, when  the  Dean  and  Chapter  of  Rochester  urged  a  request 
that  his  remains  might  be  placed  in  their  Cathedral.    This  was 


DICKENS. 


117 


assented  to ;  but  at  the  last  moment  the  Dean  of  Westminster 
gave  expression  to  a  Avidespread  wish  that  the  great  national  writer 
might  lie  in  the  national  Abbey.  There  he  was  buried  on  June  14, 
without  the  slightest  attempt  at  the  pomp  which  he  had  deprecated 
in  his  will,  and  which  he  almost  fiercely  condemned  in  more  than 
one  of  his  writings.  The  funeral,"  writes  Dean  Stanley,  whose 
own  dust  now  mingles  with  that  of  so  many  illustrious  dead,  *'  was 
strictly  private.  It  took  place  at  an  early  hour  in  the  summer 
morning,  the  grave  having  been  dug  in  secret  the  night  before,  and 
the  vast  solitary  space  of  the  Abbey  was  occupied  only  by  the  small 
band  of  the  mourners,  and  the  Abbey  clergy,  who,  without  any 
music  except  the  occasional  peal  of  the  organ,  read  the  funeral  ser- 
vice. For  days  the  spot  was  visited  by  thousands.  Many  were 
the  tears  shed  by  the  poorer  visitors.  He  rests  beside  Sheridan, 
Garrick,  and  Henderson"  —  the  first  actor  ever  buried  in  the 
Abbey.  Associations  of  another  kind  cluster  near  ;  but  his  gener- 
ous spirit  would  not  have  disdained  the  thought  that  he  would  seem 
even  in  death  the  players^  friend. 

A  plain  memorial  brass  on  the  walls  of  Rochester  Cathedral  vin- 
dicates the  share  which  the  ancient  city  and  its  neighbourhood  will 
always  have  in  his  fame.  But  most  touching  of  all  it  is  to  think  of 
him  under  the  trees  of  his  own  garden  on  the  hill,  in  the  pleasant 
home  where,  after  so  many  labours  and  so  many  wanderings,  he 
died  in  peace,  and  as  one  who  had  earned  his  rest. 


Il8  DICKENS. 


CHAPTER  VIL 

THE  FUTURE  OF  DICKENS'S  FAME. 

There  is  no  reason  whatever  to  believe  that  in  the  few  years 
which  have  gone  by  since  Dickens's  death  the  delight  taken  in  his 
works  throughout  England  and  North  America,  as  well  as  else- 
where, has  diminished,  or  that  he  is  not  still  one  of  our  few  most 
popular  writers.  The  mere  fact  that  his  popularity  has  remained 
such  since,  nearly  half  a  century  ago,  he,  like  a  beam  of  spring 
sunshine,  first  made  the  world  gay,  is  a  sufficient  indication  of  the 
influence  which  he  must  have  exercised  upon  his  age.  In  our  world 
of  letters  his  followers  have  been  many,  though,  naturally  enough, 
those  whose  original  genius  impelled  them  to  follow  their  own 
course  soonest  ceased  to  be  his  imitators.  Amongst  these  I  know 
no  more  signal  instance  than  the  great  novelist  whose  surpassing 
merits  he  had  very  swiftly  recognised  in  her  earliest  work.  For 
though  in  the  Scenes  of  Clerical  Life  George  Eliot  seems  to  be,  as 
it  were,  hesitating  between  Dickens  and  Thackeray  as  the  models 
of  her  humorous  writing,  reminiscences  of  the  former  are  unmis- 
takable in  the  opening  of  Amos  Bart07i,  in  Mr.  GilfiPs  LoveStory^ 
in  Janefs  Repe?itance ;  and  though  it  would  it  would  be  hazardous 
to  trace  his  influence  in  the  domestic  scenes  mAdajn  Bede,  neither 
a  Christmas  exordium  in  one  of  the  books  of  The  Mill  on  the  Floss ^ 
nor  the  Sam  Weller-like  freshness  of  Bob  Wakem  in  the  same  pow- 
erful story,  is  altogether  the  author's  own.  Two  of  the  most  suc- 
cessful Continental  novelists  of  the  present  day  have  gone  to 
school  with  Dickens :  the  one  the  truly  national  writer  whose  Debit 
and  Credit,  a  work  largely  in  the  manner  of  his  English  model, 
has,  as  a  picture  of  modern  life,  remained  unexcelled  in  German 
literature ;  ^  the  other,  the  brilliant  Southerner,  who  may  write  as 
much  of  the  History  of  his  Books  as  his  public  may  desire  to  learn, 
but  who  cannot  write  the  pathos  of  Dickens  altogether  out  of 
Jack,  or  his  farcical  fun  out  of  Le  Nabab.  And  again,  —  for  I  am 
merely  illustrating,  not  attempting  to  describe,  the  literary  influence 
of  Dickens,  —  who  could  fail  to  trace  in  the  Californian  studies 
and  sketches  of  Bret  Harte,  elements  of  humour  and  of  pathos,  to 

^  In  the  last  volume  of  his  magnum  opus  of  historical  fiction  Gustav  Freytag  describes 
*'  Boz  "  as,  about  the  year  1846,  filling  with  boundless  enthusiasnj  the  hearts  of  young 
men  and  maidens  in  a  small  Silesian  country  town. 


DICKENS. 


119 


which  that  genuinely  original  author  would  be  the  last  to  deny  that 
his  great  English    master  "  was  no  stranger? 

Yet  popularity  and  literary  influence,  however  wide  and  however 
strong,  often  pass  away  as  they  have  come  ;  and  in  no  field  of  liter- 
ature are  there  many  reputations  which  the  sea  of  time  fails  before 
very  long  to  submerge.  In  prose  fiction  —  a  comparatively  young 
literary  growth  —  they  are  certainly  not  the  most  numerous,  perhaps 
because  on  works  of  this  species  the  m.anners  and  style  of  an  age 
most  readily  impress  themselves,  rendering  them  proportionately 
strange  to  the  ages  that  come  after.  In  the  works  of  even  the 
lesser  playwrights  who  pleased  the  liberal  times  of  Elizabeth,  and  in 
lyrics  of  even  secondary  merit  that  were  admired  by  fantastic  Caroline 
cavaliers,  we  can  still  take  pleasure.  But  who  can  read  many  of  the 
*'  standard  "  novels  published  as  lately  even  as  the  days  of  George 
the  Fourth  ?  The  speculation  is,  therefore,  not  altogether  idle, 
whether  Dickens  saw  truly  when  labouring,  as  most  great  men  do 
labour,  in  the  belief  that  his  work  was  not  only  for  a  day.  Literary 
eminence  was  the  only  eminence  he  desired,  while  it  was  one  of  the 
very  healthiest  elements  in  his  character,  that  whatever  he  was,  he 
was  thoroughly.  He  would  not  have  told  any  one,  as  Fielding's 
author  told  Mr.  Booth  at  the  sponging-house,  that  romance-writing 

is  certainly  the  easiest  work  in  the  world; nor,  being  what  he 
was,  could  he  ever  have  found  it  such  in  his  own  case.  "Who- 
ever," he  declared,  **  is  devoted  to  an  art  must  be  content  to  give 
himself  wholly  up  to  it,  and  to  find  his  recompense  in  it."  And 
not  only  did  he  obey  his  own  labour-laws,  but  in  the  details  of  his 
work  as  a  man  of  letters  he  spared  no  pains  and  no  exercise  of 
self-control.  I  am,"  he  generously  told  a  beginner,  to  whom  he 
was  counselling  patient  endeavour,  "  an  impatient  and  impulsive 
person  myself,  but  it  has  been  for  many  years  the  constant  effort  of 
my  life  to  practise  at  my  desk  what  I  preach  to  you."  Never,  there- 
fore, has  a  man  of  letters  had  a  better  claim  to  be  judged  by  his 
works.  As  he  expressly  said  in  his  will,  he  wished  for  no  other 
monument  than  his  writings ;  and  with  their  aid  we,  who  already 
belong  to  a  new  generation,  and  whose  children  will  care  nothing 
for  the  gossip  and  the  scandal  of  which  he,  like  most  popular  celeb- 
rities, was  in  his  lifetime  privileged  or  doomed  to  become  the  theme, 
may  seek  to  form  some  definite  conception  of  his  future  place  among 
illustrious  Englishmen. 

It  would,  of  course,  be  against  all  experience  to  suppose  that  to 
future  generations  Dickens,  as  a  writer,  wdll  be  all  that  he  was  to 
his  own.  Much  that  constitutes  the  subject,  or  at  least  furnishes 
the  background,  of  his  pictures  of  English  life,  like  the  Fleet  Prison 
and  the  Marshalsea,  has  vanished,  or  is  being  improved  off  the  face 
of  the  land.  The  form,  again,  of  Dickens's  principal  works  may 
become  obsolete,  as  it  was  in  a  sense  accidental.  He  was  the  most 
popular  novelist  of  his  day ;  but  should  prose  fiction,  or  even  the 
iull  and  florid  species  of  it  which  has  enjoyed  so  long-lived  a  favour 
ever  be  out  of  season,  the  popularity  of  Dickens's  books  must  ex- 
perience an  inevitable  diminution.    And  even  before  that  day  ar- 


120 


DICKENS. 


rives  not  all  the  works  in  a  particular  species  of  literature  that  may 
to  a  particular  age  have  seemed  destined  to  live,  will  have  been  pre- 
served. Nothing  is  more  surely  tested  by  time  than  that  originality 
which  is  the  secret  of  a  writer's  continuing  to  be  famous,  and  con- 
tinuing to  be  read. 

Dickens  was  not  —  and  to  whom  in  these  latter  ages  of  literature 
could  such  a  term  be  applied.'*  — a  self-made  writer,  in  the  sense 
that  he  owed  nothing  to  those  who  had  gone  before  him.  He  was 
most  assuredly  no  classical  scholar  —  how  could  he  have  been.^ 
But  I  should  hesitate  to  call  him  an  ill-read  man,  though  he  cer- 
tainly was  neither  a  great  nor  a  catholic  reader,  and  though  he 
could  not  help  thinking  about  Nicholas  Nickleby  while  he  was 
reading  the  Curse  of  Kehaina.  In  his  own  branch  of  literature  his 
judgment  was  sound  and  sure-footed.  It  was,  of  course,  a  happy 
accident  that  as  a  boy  he  imbibed  that  taste  for  good  fiction  which 
is  a  thing  inconceivable  to  the  illiterate.  Sneers  have  been  directed 
against  the  poverty  of  his  book-shelves  in  his  earlier  days  of  author- 
ship; but  I  fancy  there  were  not  many  popular  novelists  in  1839 
who  would  have  taken  down  with  them  into  the  country  for  a  sum- 
mer sojourn,  as  Dickens  did  to  Petersham,  not  only  a  couple  of 
Scott's  novels,  but  Goldsmith,  Swift,  Fielding,  Smollett,  and  the 
British  Essayists  ;  nor  is  there  one  of  these  national  classics  — 
unless  it  be  Swift  —  with  whom  Dickens's  books  or  letters  fail 
to  show  him  to  have  been  familiar.  Of  Goldsmith's  books,  he 
told  Forster,  in  a  letter  which  the  biographer  of  Goldsmith  mod- 
estly suppressed,  he  **had  no  indifferent  perception  —  to  the  best 
of  his  remembrance  —  when  little  more  than  a  child."  He  discusses 
with  understanding  the  relative  literary  merits  of  the  serious  and 
humorous  papers  in  The  Spectator ;  and,  with  regard  to  another 
w^ork  of  unique  significance  in  the  history  of  English  fiction,  Robin- 
son Crtisoe,  he  acutely  observed  that  **one  of  the  most  popular 
books  on  earth  has  nothing  in  it  to  make  any  one  laugh  or  cry." 

It  is  a  book,"  he  added,  which  he  read  very  much."  It  may  be 
noted,  by-the-way,  that  he  was  an  attentive  and  judicious  student 
of  Hogarth ;  and  that  thus  his  criticisms  of  humorous  pictorial  art 
rested  upon  as  broad  a  basis  of  comparison  as  did  his  judgment  of 
his  great  predecessors  in  English  humorous  fiction. 

Amongst  these  predecessors  it  has  become  usual  to  assert  that 
Smollett  exercised  the  greatest  influence  upon  Dickens.  It  is  no 
doubt  true  that  in  David  Copperfield's  library  Smollett's  books 
are  mentioned  first,  and  in  the  greatest  number,  that  a  vision 
of  Roderick  Random  and  Strap  haunted  the  very  wicket-gate  at 
Blunderstone,  that  the  poor  little  hero's  first  thought  on  entering 
the  King^s  Bench  prison  was  the  strange  company  whom  Roderick 
met  in  the  Marshalsea ;  and  that  the  references  to  Smollett  and  his 
books  are  frequent  in  Dickens's  other  books  and  in  his  letters, 
Leghorn  seemed  to  him  *' made  illustrious"  by  Smollett's  grave, 
and  in  a  late  period  of  his  life  he  criticises  his  chief  fictions  with 
admirable  justice.  Htimphry  Clinker^''  he  writes,  '*is  certainly 
Smollett's  pest.   I  am  rather  divided  between  Peregrine  Pickle  and 


DICKENS. 


121 


Roderick  RaJidom,  both  extraordinarily  good  in  their  way,  which  is 
a  way  without  tenderness ;  but  you  will  have  to  read  them  both, 
and  I  send  the  first  volume  of  Peregrme  as  the  richer  of  the  two." 
An  odd  volume  of  Peregrine  was  one  of  the  books  with  which 
the  waiter  at  the  Holly  Tree  Inn  endeavoured  to  beguile  the 
lonely  Christmas  of  the  snowed-up  traveller;  but  the  latter  "  knew 
every  word  of  it  already."  In  the  Lazy  Tour^  '*  Thomas,  now  just 
able  to  grope  his  way  along,  in  a  doubled-up  condition,  was  no  bad 
embodiment  of  Commodore  Trunnion."  I  have  noted,  moreover, 
coincidences  of  detail  which  bear  witness  to  Dickens's  familiarity 
with  Smollett's  works.  To  Lieutenant  Bowling  and  Commodore 
Trunnion,  as  to  Captain  Cuttle,  every  man  was  a  *' brother;"  and 
to  the  Commodore,  as  to  Mr.  Smallweed,  the  most  abusive  sub- 
stantive addressed  to  a  woman  admitted  of  intensification  by  the 
epithet  brimstone."  I  think  Dickens  had  not  forgotten  the  open- 
ing of  the  Advent7ires  of  an  Atom  when  he  wrote  a  passage  in  the 
opening  of  his  own  Christinas  Carol;  and  that  the  characters  of 
Tom  Pinch  and  Tommy  Traddles  —  the  former  more  especially  — 
were  not  conceived  without  some  thought  of  honest  Strap.  Fur- 
thermore, it  was  Smollett's  example  that  probably  suggested  to 
Dickens  the  attractive  jingle  in  the  title  of  his  Nicholas  Nickleby. 
But  these  are  for  the  most  part  mere  details.  The  manner  of 
Dickens  as  a  whole  resembles  Fielding's  more  strikingly  than 
Smollett's,  as  it  was  only  natural  that  it  should.  The  irony  of 
Smollett  is  drier  than  was  reconcilable  with  Dickens's  nature  ;  it  is 
only  in  the  occasional  extravagances  of  his  humour  that  the  former 
anticipates  anything  in  the  latter,  and  it  is  only  the  coarsest  scenes 
of  Dickens's  earlier  books  —  such  as  that  between  Noah,  Charlotte, 
and  Mrs.  Sowerbery  in  Oliver  Twist  —  which  recall  the  whole 
manner  of  his  predecessor.  They  resemble  one  another  in  their 
descriptive  accuracy,  and  in  the  accumulation  of  detail  by  which 
they  produce  instead  of  obscuring  vividness  of  impression ;  but  it 
was  impossible  that  Dickens  should  prefer  the  general  method 
of  the  novel  of  adventure  pure  and  simple,  such  as  Smollett  pro- 
duced after  the  example  of  Gil  Bias,  to  the  less  crude  form  adopted 
,  bv  Fielding,  who  adhered  to  earlier  and  nobler  models.  With 
Fielding's,  moreover,  Dickens's  whole  nature  was  congenial ;  they 
both  had  that  tenderness  which  Smollett  lacked ;  and  the  circum- 
stance that,  of  all  English  writers  of  the  past,  Fielding's  name 
alone  was  o^iven  by  Dickens  to  one  of  his  sons,  shows  how,  like  so 
many  of  Fielding's  readers,  he  had  learnt  to  love  him  with  an 
almost  personal  affection.  The  very  spirit  of  the  author  of  Tom 
Jones  —  that  gaiety  which,  to  borrow  the  saying  of  a  recent  his- 
torian concerning  Cervantes,  renders  even  brutality  agreeable,  and 
that  charm  of  sympathetic  feeling  which  makes  us  love  those  of  his 
characters  which  he  loves  him.self — seem  astir  in  some  of  the  most 
delightful  passages  of  Dickens's  most  delightful  books.  So  in 
Pickwick^  to  begin  with,  in  .which,  by-the-way,  Fielding  is  cited 
with  a  twinkle  of  the  eye  all  his  own,  and  in  Afar  tin  Chuzzlcwit^ 
where  a  chapter  opens  with  a  passage  which  is  pure  Fielding :  — 


122 


DICKENS. 


"  It  was  morning,  and  the  beautiful  Aurora,  of  wnom  so  much  hath  been  writ- 
ten, said,  and  sung,  did,  with  her  rosy  fingers,  nip  and  tweak  Miss  Pecksniff's 
nose.  It  was  the  frolicsome  custom  of  the  goddess,  in  her  intercourse  with  the 
fair  Cherry,  to  do  so  ;  or,  in  more  prosaic  phrase,  the  tip  of  that  feature  in  the 
sweet  girl's  countenance  was  always  very  red  at  breakfast-time." 

Amongst  the  writers  of  Dickens^s  own  age  there  were  only  two, 
or  perhaps  three,  who  in  very  different  degrees  and  ways  exercised 
a  noticeable  influence  upon  his  writings.  He  once  declared  to 
Washington  Irving  that  he  kept  everything  written  by  that  delight- 
ful author  upon  *'  his  shelves,  and  in  his  thoughts,  and  in  his  heart 
of  hearts.*'  And,  doubtless,  in  Dickens's  early  days  as  an  author, 
the  influence  of  the  American  classic  may  have  aided  to  stimulate 
the  imaginative  element  in  his  English  admirer's  genius,  and  to 
preserve  him  from  a  grossness  of  humour  into  which,  after  the 
Sketches  by  he  very  rarely  allowed  himself  to  lapse.  The  two 
other  writers  were  Carlyle,  and,  as  I  have  frequently  noted  in  pre- 
vious chapters,  the  friend  and  fellow-labourer  of  Dickens's  later 
manhood,  Mr.  Wilkie  Collins.  It  is  no  unique  experience  that  the 
disciple  should  influence  the  master ;  and  in  this  instance,  perhaps 
with  the  co-operation  of  the  examples  of  the  modern  French  theatre, 
which  the  two  friends  had  studied  in  common,  Mr.  Wilkie  Collins's 
manner  had,  I  think,  no  small  share  in  bringing  about  a  transfor- 
mation in  that  of  Dickens.  His  stories  thus  gradually  lost  all  traces 
of  the  older  masters  both  in  general  method  and  in  detail ;  whilst 
he  came  to  condense  and  concentrate  his  effects  in  successions  of 
skilfully  arranged  scenes.  Dickens's  debt  to  Carlyle  was,  of  course, 
of  another  nature ;  and  in  his  works  the  proofs  are  not  few  of  his 
readiness  to  accept  the  teachings  of  one  whom  he  declared  he 
would  go  at  all  times  farther  to  see  than  any  man  alive."  There 
was  something  singular  in  the  admiration  these  two  men  felt  for  one 
another ;  for  Carlyle,  after  an  acquaintance  of  almost  thirty  years, 
spoke  of  Dickens  as  a  most  cordial,  sincere,  clear-sighted,  quietly 
decisive,  just,  and  loving  man ; "  and  there  is  not  one  of  these 
epithets  but  seems  well  considered  and  well  chosen.  But  neither 
Carlyle  nor  Dickens  possessed  a  moral  quality  omitted  in  this  list, 
the  quality  of  patience,  which  abhors  either  "quietly"  or  loudly 
*' deciding"  a  question  before  considering  it  under  all  its  aspects,  * 
and  in  a  spirit  of  fairness  to  all  sides.  The  Latter-Day  Pamphlets^ 
to  confine  myself  to  them,^  like  so  much  of  the  political  philosophy, 
if  it  is  to  be  dignified  by  that  name,  whicli  in  part  Dickens  derived 
from  them,  were  at  the  time  effective  strokes  of  satirical  invective ; 
now,  their  edge  seems  blunt  and  their  energy  inflation.  Take  the 
pamphlet  on  Model  Prisons,  with  its  summary  of  a  theory  which 
Dickens  sought  in  every  way  to  enforce  upon  his  readers  ;  or  again, 
that  entitled  Dowimig  Street.,  which  settles  the  question  of  party 
government  as  a  question  of  the  choice  between  Buffy  and  Boodle, 

1  The  passage  in  Oliver  Twist  (chapter  xxxvii.)  which  illustrates  the  maxioi  that 
**  dignity,  and  even  holiness  too,  sometimes  are  more  questions  of  coat  and  waistcoat  than 
some  people  imagine,"  may,  or  may  not,  be  a  reminiscence  of  Sartor  Resartits,  then 
(1838)  first  published  in  a  volume. 


DICKENS. 


123 


or,  according  to  Carlyle,  the  honourable  Felix  Parvulus  and  the 
Right  Honourable  Felicissimus  Zero.  The  corrosive  power  of 
such  sarcasms  may  be  unquestionable ;  but  the  angry  rhetoric 
pointed  by  them  becomes  part  of  tlie  nature  of  those  who  habitually 
employ  its  utterance  in  lieu  of  argument ;  and  not  a  little  of  the  de- 
clamatory element  in  Dickens,  which  no  doubt  at  first  exercised  its 
effect  upon  a  large  number  of  readers,  must  be  ascribed  to  his  read- 
ing of  a  great  writer  who  was  often  very  much  more  stimulative 
than  nutritious. 

Something,  then,  he  owed  to  other  writers,  but  it  was  little  in- 
deed in  comparison  with  what  he  owed  to  his  natural  gifts.  First 
amongst  these,  I  think,  must  be  placed  what  may,  in  a  word,  be 
called  his  sensibility  —  that  quality  of  which  humour,  in  the  more 
limited  sense  of  the  word,  and  pathos  are  the  twin  products.  And 
in  Dickens  both  these  were  paramount  powers,  almost  equally  vari- 
ous in  their  forms  and  effective  in  their  operation.  According  to 
M.  Taine,  Dickens,  whilst  he  excels  in  irony  of  a  particular  sort, 
being  an  Englishman,  is  incapable  of  being  gay.  Such  profundi- 
ties are  unfathomable  to  the  readers  of  Pickwick ;  though  the 
French  critic  may  have  generalised  from  Dickens\s  later  writings 
only.  His  pathos  is  not  less  true  than  various,  for  the  gradations 
are  marked  between  the  stern,  tragic  pathos  of  Hard  Tivies^ 
the  melting  pathos  of  the  Old  Curiosity  Shop,  Dombey  a?id  Sou, 
and  David  Copperfield,  and  the  pathos  of  helplessness  which  ap- 
peals to  us  in  Smike  and  Jo.  But  this  sensibility  would  not  have 
given  us  Dickens's  gallery  of  living  pictures  had  it  not  been  for 
the  powers  of  imagination  and  observation  which  enabled  him 
spontaneously  to  exercise  it  in  countless  directions.  To  the  way  in 
which  his  imagination  enabled  him  to  identify  himself  with  the  fig- 
ments of  his  own  brain  he  frequently  testified  ;  Dante  was  not  more 
certain  in  his  celestial  and  infernal  topography  than  was  Dickens 
as  to  every  stair  in  the  little  midshipman's  house,"  and  as  to 
every  young  gentleman's  bedstead  in  Dr.  Blimber\s  establishment." 
One  particular  class  of  phenomena  may  be  instanced  instead  of 
many,  in  the  observation  and  poetic  reproduction  of  which  his  sin- 
gular natural  endowment  continually  manifested  itself  —  I  mean 
those  of  the  weather.  It  is  not,  indeed,  often  that  he  rises  to  a  fine 
image  like  that  in  the  description  of  the  night  in  which  Ralph  Nick- 
leby,  ruined  and  crushed,  slinks  home  to  his  death  :  — 

"  The  night  was  dark,  and  a  cold  wind  blew,  driving  the  clouds  furiously  and 
fast  before  it.  There  was  one  black,  gloomy  mass  that  seemed  to  follow  him  : 
not  hurrying  in  the  wild  chase  with  the  others,  but  lingering  sullenly  behind,  and 
gliding  darkly  and  stealthily  on.  He  often  looked  back  at  this,  and  more  than 
once  stopped  to  let  it  pass  over ;  but,  somehow,  when  he  went  forward  again  it 
was  still  behind  him,  coming  mournfully  and  slowly  up,  like  a  shadowy  funeral 
train." 

But  he  again  and  again  enables  us  to  feel  as  if  the  Christmas 
morning  on  which  Mr.  Pickwick  ran  gaily  down  the  slide,  or  as  if 
the  **  very  quiet"  moonlit  night,  in  the  midst  of  which  a  sudden 


124 


DICKENS. 


sound,  like  the  firing  of  a  gun  or  a  pistol,  startled  the  repose  of 
Lincoln's  Inn  Fields,  were  not  only  what  we  have  often  precisely 
experienced  in  country  villages  or  in  London  squares,  but  as  if 
they  were  the  very  morning  and  the  very  night  which  we  must 
experience,  if  we  were  feeling  the  glow  of  wintry  merriment,  or 
the  awful  chill  of  the  presentiment  of  evil  in  a  dead  hour.  In 
its  lower  form  this  combination  of  the  powers  of  imagination  and 
observation  has  the  rapidity  of  wit,  and,  indeed,  sometimes  is  wit. 
The  gift  of  suddenly  finding  out  what  a  man,  a  thing,  a  combina- 
tion of  man  and  thing,  is  like  —  this,  too,  comes  by  nature;  and 
there  is  something  electrifying  in  its  sudden  exercise,  even  on  the 
most  trivial  occasions,  as  when  Flora,  delighted  with  Little  Dorrit's 
sudden  rise  to  fortune,  requests  to  know  all 

"  about  the  good,  dear,  quiet  little  thing,  and  all  the  changes  of  her  fortunes, 
carriage  people  now,  no  doubt,  and  horses  without  number  most  romantic,  a 
coat  of  arms,  of  course,  and  wild  beasts  on  their  hind  legs,  showing  it  as  if  it 
was  a  copy  they  had  done  with  mouths  from  ear  to  ear,  good  gracious  I " 

But  Nature,  when  she  gifted  Dickens  with  sensibility,  observa- 
tion, and  imagination,  had  bestowed  upon  him  yet  another  boon  in 
the  quality  which  seems  more  prominent  than  any  other  in  his 
whole  being.  The  vigour  of  Dickens  —  a  mental  and  moral  vigour 
supported  by  a  splendid  physical  organism  —  was  the  parent  of 
some  of  his  foibles ;  amongst  the  rest,  of  his  tendency  to  exaggera- 
tion. No  fault  has  been  more  frequently  found  with  his  workman- 
ship than  this ;  nor  can  he  be  said  to  have  defended  himself  very 
successfully  on  this  head  when  he  declared  that  he  did  "  not  recol- 
lect ever  to  have  heard  or  seen  the  charge  of  exaggeration  made 
against  a  feeble  performance,  though,  in  its  feebleness,  it  may  have 
been  most  untrue."  But  without  this  vigour  he  could  not  have 
been  creative  as  he  was ;  and  in  him  there  were  accordingly  united 
with  rare  completeness  a  swift  responsiveness  to  the  impulses  of 
humour  and  pathos,  an  inexhaustible  fertility  in  discovering  and  in- 
venting materials  for  their  exercise,  and  the  constant  creative  desire 
to  give  these  newly-created  materials  a  vivid  plastic  form. 

And  the  mention  of  this  last-named  gift  in  Dickens  suggests  the 
query  whether,  finally,  there  is  anything  in  his  manner  as  a  writer 
which  may  prevent  the  continuance  of  his  extraordinary  popularity. 
No  writer  can  be  great  without  a  manner  of  his  own ;  and  that 
Dickens  had  such  a  manner  his  most  supercilious  censurer  will 
readily  allow.  His  terse  narrative  power,  often  intensely  humorous 
in  its  unblushing  and  unwinking  gravity,  and  often  deeply  pathetic 
in  its  simplicity,  is  as  characteristic  of  his  manner  as  is  the  supreme 
felicity  of  phrase,  in  which  he  has  no  equal.  As  to  the  latter,  I 
should  hardly  know  where  to  begin  and  where  to  leave  off  were  I  to 
attempt  to  illustrate  it.  But,  to  take  two  instances  of  different  kinds 
of  wit,  I  may  cite  a  passage  in  Guster's  narrative  of  her  interview 
with  Lady  Dedlock:  And  so  I  took  the  letter  from  her,  and  she 
said  she  had  nothing  to  give  me  ;  and  /  said  I  was  poor  myself  and 


DICKENS. 


125 


consequently  wanted  nothing;  "  and,  of  a  different  kind,  the  account 
in  one  of  his  letters  of  a  conversation  with  Macready,  in  which  the 
great  tragedian,  after  a  solemn  but  impassioned  commendation  of 
his  friend's  reading,  **put  his  hand  upon  my  breast  and  pulled  out 
his  pocket-handkerchief,  and  /  felt  as  if  I  were  doing  so7nebody  to 
his  Werner,''''  These,  I  think,  were  amongst  the  most  characteris- 
tic merits  of  his  style.  It  also,  and  more  especially  in  his  later 
years,  had  its  characteristic  faults.  The  danger  of  degenerating 
into  mannerism  is  incident  to  every  original  manner.  There  is 
mannerism  in  most  of  the  great  English  prose-writers  of  Dickens's 
age,  —  in  Carlyle,  in  Macaulay,  in  Thackeray,  —  but  in  none  of  them 
is  there  more  mannerism  than  in  Dickens  himself.  In  his  earlier 
writings,  in  Nicholas  Nickleby,  for  instance  (I  do  not,  of  course, 
refer  to  the  Portsmouth  boards),  and  even  in  Martin  Chuzzlewity 
there  is  much  staginess ;  but  in  his  later  works  his  own  mannerism 
had  swallowed  up  that  of  the  stage,  and,  more  especially  in  serious 
passages,  his  style  had  become  what  M.  Taine  happily  characterises 
as  le  style  tourniente.  His  choice  of  words  remained  throughout 
excellent,  and  his  construction  of  sentences  clear.  He  told  Mr. 
Wilkie  Collins  that  underlining  was  not  his  nature and  in  truth 
he  had  no  need  to  emphasise  his  expressions,  or  to  bid  the  reader 
**go  back  upon  their  meaning."  He  recognised  his  responsibility, 
as  a  popular  writer,  in  keeping  the  vocabulary  of  the  language  pure  ; 
and  in  Little  Dorrit  he  even  solemnly  declines  to  use  the  French 
word  trousseau.  In  his  orthography,  on  the  other  hand,  he  was 
not  free  from  Americanisms ;  and  his  interpunctuation  was  consis- 
tently odd.  But  these  are  trifles;  his  more  important  mannerisms 
were,  like  many  really  dangerous  faults  of  style,  only  the  excess  of 
characteristic  excellences.  Thus  it  was  he  who  elaborated  with 
unprecedented  effect  that  humorous  species  of  paraphrase  which, 
as  one  of  the  most  imitable  devices  of  his  style,  has  also  been  the 
most  persistently  imitated.  We  are  all  tickled  when  Grip,  the 
raven,  issues  orders  for  the  instant  preparation  of  innumerable 
kettles  for  purposes  of  tea ;  "  or  when  Mr.  Pecksniff's  e\'e  is  piously 
upraised,  with  something  of  that  expression  which  the  poetry  of 
ages  has  attributed  to  a  domestic  bird,  when  breathing  its  last  amid 
the  ravages  of  an  electric  storm  ;  "  but  in  the  end  the  device  becomes 
a  mere  trick  of  circumlocution.  Another  mannerism  which  grew 
upon  Dickens,  and  was  faithfully  imitated  by  several  of  his  disciples, 
was  primarily  due  to  his  habit  of  turning  a  fact,  fancy,  or  situation 
round  on  every  side.  This  consisted  in  the  reiteration  of  a  construc- 
tion, or  of  part  of  a  construction,  in  the  strained  rhetorical  fashion 
to  which  he  at  last  accustomed  us  in  spite  of  ourselves,  but  to  which 
we  were  loath  to  submit  in  his  imitators.  These  and  certain  other 
peculiarities,  which  it  would  be  difficult  to  indicate  without  incur- 
ring the  charge  of  hypercriticism,  hardened  as  the  style  of  Dickens 
hardened ;  and,  for  instance,  in  the  Tale  of  Two  Cities  his  man- 
nerisms may  be  seen  side  by  side  in  glittering  array.  By  way  of 
compensation,  the  occasional  solecisms  and  vulgarisms  of  his  earlier 
style  (he  only  very  gradually  ridded  himself  of  the  cockney  habit  of 


126 


DICKENS, 


punning)  no  longer  marred  his  pages ;  and  he  ceased  to  break  or 
lapse  occasionally,  in  highly  impassioned  passages,  into  blank  verse. 

From  first  to  last  Dickens's  mannerism,  like  everything  which  he 
made  part  of  himself,  was  not  merely  assumed  on  occasion,  but  was, 
so  to  speak,  absorbed  into  his  nature.  It  shows  itself  in  almost 
everything  that  he  wrote  in  his  later  years,  from  the  most  carefully 
elaborated  chapters  of  his  books  down  to  the  most  deeply  felt  pas- 
sages of  his  most  familiar  correspondence,  in  the  midst  of  the  most 
genuine  pathos  and  most  exuberant  humour  of  his  books,  and  in  the 
midst  of  the  sound  sense  and  unaffected  piety  of  his  private  letters. 
Future  generations  may,  for  this  very  reason,  be  perplexed  and  irri- 
tated by  what  we  merely  stumbled  at,  and  may  wish  that  what  is  an 
element  hardly  separable  from  many  of  Dickens's  compositions  were 
away  from  them,  as  one  wishes  away  from  his  signature  that  horrible 
flourish  which  in  his  letters  he  sometimes  represents  himself  as  too 
tired  to  append. 

But  no  distaste  for  his  mannerisms  is  likely  to  obscure  the  sense 
of  his  achievements  in  the  branch  of  literature  to  which  he  devoted 
the  full  powers  of  his  genius  and  the  best  energies  of  his  nature. 
He  introduced,  indeed,  no  new  species  of  prose  fiction  into  our  lit- 
erature. In  the  historical  novel  he  made  two  far  from  unsuccess- 
ful essays,  in  the  earlier  of  which  in  particular  —  Baj'naby  Rndge  — 
he  showed  a  laudable  desire  to  enter  into  the  spirit  of  a  past  age ; 
but  he  was  without  the  reading  or  the  patience  of  either  the  author 
of  Waverley  or  the  author  of  The  Virginians ^  and  without  the  fine 
historic  enthusiasm  which  animates  the  broader  workmanship  of 
Westward  Ho.  For  the  purely  imaginative  romance,  on  the  other 
hand,  of  which  in  some  of  his  works  Lord  Lytton  was  the  most 
prominent  representative  in  contemporary  English  literature, 
Dickens's  genius  was  not  without  certain  affinities ;  but,  to  feel  his 
full  strength,  he  needed  to  touch  the  earth  with  his  feet.  Thus  it 
is  no  mere  phrase  to  say  of  him  that  he  found  the  ideal  in  the  real, 
and  drew  his  inspirations  from  the  world  around  him.  Perhaps  the 
strongest  temptation  which  ever  seemed  likely  to  divert  him  from  the 
sounder  forms  in  which  his  masterpieces  were  cast,  lay  in  the  direc- 
tion of  the  novel  with  a  piirpose^  the  fiction  intended  primarily  and 
above  all  things  to  promote  the  correction  of  some  social  abuse,  or 
the  achievement  of  some  social  reform.  But  in  spite  of  himself,  to 
whom  the  often  voiceless  cause  of  the  suffering  and  the  oppressed 
was  at  all  times  dearer  than  any  mere  literary  success,  he  was  pre- 
served from  binding  his  muse,  as  his  friend  Cruikshank  bound  his 
art,  handmaid  in  a  service  with  which  freedom  was  irreconcilable. 
His  artistic  instinct  helped  him  in  this,  and  perhaps  also  the  con- 
sciousness that  where,  as  in  The  Chi7Jies^  or  in  Hard  Ti?nes,  he  had 
gone  furthest  in  this  direction,  there  had  been  something  jarring  in 
the  result.  Thus,  under  the  influences  described  above,  he  carried 
on  the  English  novel  mainly  in  the  directions  which  it  had  taken 
under  its  early  masters,  and  more  especially  in  those  in  which  the 
essential  attributes  of  his  own  genius  prompted  him  to  excel. 

Amongst  the  elements  on  which  the  effect  alike  of  the  novelist's 


DICKENS, 


127 


and  of  the  dramatist's  work  must,  apart  from  style  and  diction, 
essentially  depend,  that  of  construction  is  obviously  one  of  the 
most  significant.  In  this  Dickens  was,  in  the  earlier  period  of  his 
authorship,  very  far  from  strong.  This  was  due  in  part  to  the  acci- 
dent that  he  began  his  literary  career  as  a  writer  of  Sketches,  and 
that  his  first  continuous  book,  Pickwick^  was  originally  designed  as 
little  more  than  a  string  of  such.  It  was  due  in  a  still  greater 
measure  to  the  influence  of  those  masters  of  English  fiction  with 
whom  he  had  been  familiar  from  boyhood,  above  all  to  Smollett. 
And  though,  by  dint  of  his  usual  energy,  he  came  to  be  able  to 
invent  a  plot  so  generally  effective  as  that  of  A  Tale  of  Two  Cities^ 
or,  I  was  about  to  say,  of  The  Mystery  of  Edwin  D^-ood,  yet  on 
this  head  he  had  had  to  contend  against  a  special  difficulty ;  I 
mean,  of  course,  the  publication  of  most  of  his  books  in  monthly  or 
even  weekly  numbers.  In  the  case  of  a  writer  both  pathetic  and 
humorous,  the  serial  method  of  publication  leads  the  public  to 
expect  its  due  allowance  of  both  pathos  and  humour  every  month 
or  week,  even  if  each  number,  to  borrow  a  homely  simile  applied 
in  Oliver  Twist  to  books  in  general,  need  not  contain  "  the  tragic 
and  the  comic  scenes  in  as  regular  alternation  as  the  layers  of  red 
and  white  in  a  side  of  streaky  bacon."  And  again,  as  in  a  melo- 
drama of  the  old  school,  each  serial  division  has,  if  possible,  to 
close  emphatically,  effectively,  with  a  promise  of  yet  stranger,  more 
touching,  more  laughable  things  to  come.  On  the  other  hand,  with 
this  form  of  publication,  repetition  is  frequently  necessary  by  way 
of  reminder"  to  indolent  readers,  whose  memory  needs  refresh- 
ing, after  the  long  pauses  between  the  acts.  Fortunately,  Dickens 
abhorred  living,  as  it  were,  from  hand  to  mouth,  and  thus  dimin- 
ished the  dangers  to  which,  I  cannot  help  thinking,  Thackeray  at 
times,  almost  succumbed.  Yet,  notwithstanding,  in  the  arrange- 
ment of  his  incidents  and  the  contrivance  of  his  plots,  it  is  often 
impossible  to  avoid  noting  the  imperfection  of  the  machinery,  or  at 
least  the  traces  of  eiYort.  I  have  already  said  under  what  influences, 
in  my  opinion,  Dickens  acquired  a  constructive  skill  which  would 
have  been  conspicuous  in  most  other  novelists. 

If  in  the  combination  of  parts  the  workmanship  of  Dickens  was 
not  invariably  of  the  best,  on  the  other  hand,  in  the  invention  of 
those  parts  themselves  he  excelled,  his  imaginative  power  and  dra- 
matic instinct  combining  to  produce  an  endless  succession  of  efl'ect- 
ive  scenes  and  situations,  ranging  through  almost  every  variety  of 
the  pathetic  and  the  humorous.  In  no  direction  was  nature  a  more 
powerful  aid  to  art  with  him  than  in  this.  From  his  very  boyhood 
he  appears  to  have  possessed  in  a  developed  form  what  many  others 
may  possess  in  its  germ,  the  faculty  of  converting  into  a  scene  — 
putting,  as  it  were,  into  a  frame  —  personages  that  came  under  his 
notice,  and  the  background  on  which  he  saw  them.  Wlio  can  for- 
get the  scene  in  David  Copperfield  in  which  the  friendless  little  boy 
attracts  the  wonderment  of  the  good  people  of  the  public-house, 
where  —  it  being  a  special  occasion  —  he  has  demanded  a  glass  of 
their    very  best  ale,  with  a  head  to  it"?    In  the  autobiographical 


128 


DICKENS. 


fragment  already  cited,  where  the  story  appears  in  almost  the  same 
words,  Dickens  exclaims  :  — 

^'  Here  we  stand,  all  three,  before  me  now,  in  my  study  in  Devonshire  Terrace. 
The  landlord,  in  his  shirt-sleeves,  leaning  against  the  bar  window-frame ;  his 
wife,  looking  over  the  little  half-door  ;  and  I,  in  some  confusion,  looking  up  at 
them  from  outside  the  partition." 

He  saw  the  scene  while  he  was  an  actor  in  it.  Already  the 
Sketches  by  Boz  showed  the  exuberance  of  this  power,  and  in  his 
last  years  more  than  one  paper  in  the  delightful  Uncommercial 
Traveller  series  proved  it  to  be  as  inexhaustible  as  ever,  w^hile  the 
art  with  which  it  was  exercised  had  become  more  refined.  Who 
has  better  described  (for  who  was  more  sensitive  to  it  ?)  the  mys- 
terious influence  of  crowds,  and  who  the  pitiful  pathos  of  solitude  ? 
Who  has  ever  surpassed  Dickens  in  his  representations,  varied  a 
thousandfold,  but  still  appealing  to  the  same  emotions,  common  to 
us  all,  of  the  crises  or  turning-points  of  human  life  ?  Who  has 
dwelt  with  a  more  potent  effect  on  that  catastrophe  which  the 
drama  of  every  human  life  must  reach  ;  v/hose  scenes  of  death  in  its 
pathetic,  pitiful,  reverend,  terrible,  ghastly  forms  speak  more  to  the 
imagination  and  more  to  the  heart  ?  There  is,  however,  one 
species  of  scenes  in  which  the  genius  of  Dickens  seems  to  me 
to  exercise  a  still  stronger  spell  —  those  which  precede  a  catas- 
trophe, which  are  charged  like  thunder-clouds  with  the  coming 
storm.  And  here  the  constructive  art  is  at  work ;  for  it  is  the 
arrangement  of  the  incidents,  past  and  to  come,  combined  by 
anticipation  in  the  mind  of  the  reader,  which  gives  their  extraor- 
dinary force  to  such  scenes  as  the  nocturnal  watching  of  Nancy  by 
Noah,  or  Carker's  early  w^alk  to  the  railroad  station,  where  he  is 
to  meet  his  doom.  Extremely  powerful,  too,  in  a  rather  different 
way,  is  the  scene  in  Little  Dorrit,  described  in  a  word  or  two,  of 
the  parting  of  Bar  and  Physician  at  dawn,  after  they  have  found 
out  Mr.  Merdle's  complaint :  "  — 

"  Before  parting,  at  Physician's  door,  they  both  looked  up  at  the  sunny 
morning  sky,  into  which  the  smoke  of  a  few  early  fires,  and  the  breath  and  voices 
of  a  few  early  stirrers,  were  peacefully  rising,  and  then  looked  round  upon  the 
immense  city  and  said  :  '  If  all  those  hundreds  and  thousands  of  beggared  people 
who  were  yet  asleep  could  only  know,  as  they  two  spoke,  the  ruin  that  im- 
pended over  them,  what  a  fearful  cry  against  one  miserable  soul  v/ould  go  up  to 
Heaven  ! ' " 

Nor  is  it  awe  only,  but  pity  also,  which  he  is  able  thus  to  move 
beforehand,  as  in  Doinbey  and  Son^  in  the  incomparable  scenes 
leading  up  to  little  Paul's  death. 

More  diverse  opinions  have  been  expressed  as  to  Dickens's  mas- 
tery of  that  highest  part  of  the  novelist's  art,  which  we  call 
characterisation.  Undoubtedly,  the  characters  which  he  draws 
are  included  in  a  limited  range.  Yet  I  question  whether  their 
range  can  be  justly  termed  narrow  as  compared  with  that  com- 
manded by  any  other  great  English  novelist  except  Scott,  or 


DICKENS. 


129 


with  those  of  many  novelists  of  other  literatures  except  Balzac. 
But  within  his  own  range  Dickens  is  unapproached.  His  novels 
do  not  altogether  avoid  the  common  danger  of  uninteresting  heroes 
and  insipid  heroines ;  but  only  a  very  few  of  his  heroes  are  con- 
ventionally declamatory  like  Nicholas  Nickleby,  and  few  of  his 
heroines  simper  sentimentally  like  Rose  Maylie.  Nor  can  I  for  a 
moment  assent  to  the  condemnation  which  has  been  pronounced 
upon  all  the  female  characters  in  Dickens's  books,  as  more  or  less 
feeble  or  artificial.  At  the  same  time  it  is  true  that  from  women 
of  a  mightier  mould  Dickens's  imagination  turns  aside ;  he  could 
not  have  drawn  a  Dorothea  Casaubon  any  more  than  he  could  have 
drawn  Romola  herself.  Similarly,  heroes  of  the  chivalrous  or  mag- 
nanimous type,  representatives  of  generous  effort  in  a  great  cause, 
will  not  easily  be  met  with  in  his  writings :  he  never  even  essayed 
the  picture  of  an  artist  devoted  to  Art  for  her  own  sake. 

It  suited  the  genius,  and  in  later  years  perhaps  the  temper,  of 
Dickens  as  an  author  to  leave  out  of  sight  those  public  virtues'' 
to  which  no  man  was  in  truth  less  blind  than  himself,  and  to 
remain  content  with  the  illustration  of  types  of  the  private  or 
domestic  kind.  We  may  cheerfully  take  to  us  the  censure  that 
our  great  humourist  was  in  nothing  more  English  than  in  this  — 
that  his  sympathy  with  the  affections  of  the  hearth  and  the  home 
knew  almost  no  bounds.  A  symbolisation  of  this  may  be  found 
in  the  honour  which,  from  the  Sketches  and  Pickwick  onwards, 
through  a  long  series  of  Christmas  books  and  Christmas  numbers, 
Dickens,  doubtless  very  consciously,  paid  to  the  one  great  festival 
of  English  family  life.  Yet  so  far  am  I  from  agreeing  with  those 
critics  who  think  that  he  is  hereby  lowered  to  the  level  of  the 
poets  of  the  teapot  and  the  plum-pudding,  that  I  am  at  a  loss  how 
to  express  my  admiration  for  this  side  of  his  genius  —  tender  with 
the  tenderness  of  Cowper,  playful  with  the  playfulness  of  Gold- 
smith, natural  with  the  naturalness  of  the  author  of  Avielia,  Who 
was  ever  more  at  home  with  children  than  he,  and,  for  that  matter, 
with  babies  to  begin  with  ?  Mr.  Horne  relates  how  he  once  heard 
a  lady  exclaim:  *'  Oh,  do  read  to  us  about  the  baby;  Dickens  is 
capital  at  a  baby!"  Even  when  most  playful,  most  farcical  con- 
cerning children,  his  fun  is  rarely  without  something  of  true  ten- 
derness, for  he  knew  the  meaning  of  that  dreariest  solitude  which 
he  has  so  often  pictured,  but  nowhere,  of  course,  with  a  truthful- 
ness going  so  straight  to  the  heart  as  in  David  Copperjield — the 
solitude  of  a  child  left  to  itself.  Another  wonderfully  true  child- 
character  is  that  of  Pip,  in  G^'eat  Expectaiions,  who  is  also,  as  his 
years  progress,  an  admirable  study  of  boy-nature.  For  Dickens 
thoroughly  understood  what  that  mysterious  variety  of  humankind 
really  is,  and  was  always,  if  one  may  so  say,  on  the  lookout  for 
him.  He  knew  him  in  the  brightness  and  freshness  which  makes 
true  in^enus  of  such  delightful  characters  (rare  enough  in  fiction) 
as  Walter  Gay  and  Mrs.  Lirriper's  grandson.  He  knew  him  in  his 
festive  mood  —  witness  the  amusing  letter  in  which  he  describes  a 
water-expedition  at  Eton  with  his  son  and  two  of  his  irrepressible 


I30 


DICKENS, 


school-fellows.  He  knew  him  in  his  precocity — the  boy  of  about 
three  feet  high,  at  the  George  and  Vulture,''  in  a  hairy  cap  and 
fustian  overalls,  whose  garb  bespoke  a  laudable  ambition  to  attain 
in  time  the  elevation  of  an  hostler ; ''  and  the  thing  on  the  roof  of 
the  Harrisburg  coach,  which,  when  the  rain  was  over,  slowly  up- 
reared  itself,  and  patronisingly  piped  out  the  enquiry :  Well, 
now,  stranger,  I  guess  you  find  this  almost  like  an  English  arter- 
noon,  hey?"  He  knew  the  Gavroche  who  danced  attendance  on 
Mr.  Q^ilp  at  his  wharf,  and  those  strangest,  but  by  no  means  least 
true,  types  of  all,  the  pupil-teachers  in  Mr.  Fagin's  academy. 

But  these,  with  the  exception  of  the  last-named,  which  show 
much  shrewd  and  kindly  insight  into  the  paradoxes  of  human  na- 
ture, are,  of  course,  the  mere  croqtns  of  the  great  humourist's 
pencil.  His  men  and  women,  and  the  passions,  the  desires,  the 
loves,  and  hatreds  that  agitate  them,  he  has  usually  chosen  to 
depict  on  that  background  of  domestic  life  which  is  in  a  greater  or 
less  degree  common  to  us  all.  And  it  is  thus  also  that  he  has 
secured  to  himself  the  vast  public  which  vibrates  very  differently 
from  a  mere  class  or  section  of  society  to  the  touch  of  a  popular 
speaker  or  writer.  The  more,"  he  writes,  "  we  see  of  life  and  its 
brevity,  and  the  world  and  its  varieties,  the  more  we  know  that  no 
exercise  of  our  abilities  in  any  art,  but  the  addressing  of  it  to  the 
great  ocean  of  humanity  in  which  we  are  drops,  and  not  to  by-ponds 
(very  stagnant)  here  and  there,  ever  can  or  ever  will  lay  the  foun- 
dations of  an  endurable  retrospect.'^  The  types  of  character  which 
in  his  fictions  he  chiefly  delights  in  reproducing  are  accordingly 
those  which  most  of  us  have  opportunities  enough  of  comparing 
vv^ith  the  reaJities  around  us ;  and  this  test,  a  sound  one  within 
reasonable  limits,  was  the  test  he  demanded.  To  no  other  author 
were  his  own  characters  ever  more  real ;  and  Forster  observes  that 

what  he  had  most  to  notice  in  Dickens  at  the  very  outset  of  his 
career  was  his  indifference  to  any  praise  of  his  performances  on  the 
merely  literary  side,  compared  with  the  higher  recognition  of  them 
as  bits  of  actual  life,  with  the  meaning  and  purpose,  on  their  part, 
and  the  responsibility  on  his,  of  realities,  rather  than  creations  of 
fancy."  It  is,  then,  the  favourite  growths  of  our  own  age  and 
country  for  which  we  shajl  i-qoSt  readily  look  in  his  works,  and  not 
look  in  vain :  avarice  and  prodigality ;  pride  in  all  its  phases ; 
hypocrisy  in  its  endless  varieties,  unctuous  and  plausible,  fawning 
and  self-satisfied,  formal  and  moral ;  and,  on  the  other  side,  faith- 
fulness, simplicity,  long-suffering  patience,  and  indomitable,  heroic 
good-humour.  Do  we  not  daily  make  room  on  the  pavement  for 
Mr.  Dombey,  erect,  solemn,  and  icy,  along-side  of  whom  in  the 
road  Mr.  Carker  deferentially  walks  his  sleek  horse?  Do  we  not 
know  more  than  one  Anthony  Chuzzlewit  laying  up  money  for  him- 
self and  his  son,  and  a  curse  for  both  along  Vv'ith  it ;  and  many  a 
Richard  Carston,  sinking,  sinking,  as  the  hope  grows  feebler  that 
Justice  or  Fortune  will  at  last  help  one  who  has  not  learnt  how  to 
help  himself?  And  will  not  prodigals  of  a  more  buoyant  kind,  like 
the  immortal  Mr.  Micawber  (though,  maybe,  with  an  eloquence 


DICKENS, 


less  ornate  than  his),  when  their  boat  is  on  the  shore,  and  tJieir 
bark  is  on  the  sea,  become  perfectly  business-hke  and  perfectly 
practical,"  and  propose,  in  acknowledgment  of  a  parting  gift  we 
had  neither  hoped  nor  desired  to  see  again,  bills  "  or,  if  we  should 
prefer  it,  a  bond,  or  any  other  description  of  security  "?  All  this 
will  happen  to  us,  as  surely  as  we  shall  be  buttonholed  by  Peck- 
sniffs in  a  state  of  philanthropic  exultation ;  and  watched  round 
corners  by  'umble  but  observant  Uriah  Heeps  ;  and  affronted  in 
what  is  best  in  us  by  the  worst  hypocrite  of  all,  the  hypocrite  of 
religion,  who  flaunts  in  our  eyes  his  greasy  substitute  for  what  he 
calls  the  "  light  of  terewth."  To  be  sure,  unless  it  be  Mr.  Chad- 
band  and  those  of  his  tribe,  we  shall  find  the  hypocrite  and  the 
man-out-at-elbows  in  real  life  less  endurable  than  their  representa- 
tives in  fiction  ;  for  Dickens  well  understood  that  if  you  do  not 
administer  a  disagreeable  character  carefully,  the  public  have  a 
decided  tendency  to  think  that  the  story  is  disagreeable,  and  not 
merely  the  fictitious  form."  His  economy  is  less  strict  with  char- 
acters of  the  opposite  class,  true  copies  of  Nature's  own  handi- 
work, —  the  Tom  Pinches  and  Trotty  Vecks  and  Clara  Peggottys, 
who  reconcile  us  with  our  kind,  and  Mr.  Pickwick  himself,  "a 
human  being  replete  with  benevolence,"  to  borrow  a  phrase  from 
a  noble  passage  in  Dickens's  most  congenial  predecessor.  These 
characters  in  Dickens  have  a  warmth  which  only  the  creations  of 
Fielding  and  Smollett  had  possessed  before,  and  which,  like  these 
old  masters,  he  occasionally  carries  to  excess.  At  the  other  ex- 
treme stand  those  characters  in  which  the  art  of  Dickens,  always 
in  union  with  the  promptings  of  his  moral  nature,  illustrates  the 
mitigating  or  redeeming  qualities  observable  even  in  the  outcasts 
of  our  civilisation.  To  me  his  figures  of  this  kind,  when  they  are 
not  too  intensely  elaborated,  are  not  the  least  touching ;  and  there 
is  something  as  pathetic  in  the  uncouth  convict  Magwitch  as  in  the 
consumptive  crossing-sweeper  Jo. 

As  a  matter  of  course  it  is  possible  to  take  exceptions  of  one  kind 
or  another  to  some  of  the  characters  created  by  Dickens  in  so  ex- 
traordinary a  profusion.  I  hardly  know  of  any  other  novelist  less 
obnoxious  to  the  charge  of  repeating  himself  {  though,  of  course, 
many  characters  in  his  earlier  or  shorter  works  contained  in  them- 
selves the  germs  of  later  and  fuller  developments.  But  Bob  Sawyer 
and  Dick  Swiveller,  Noah  Claypole  and  Uriah  Heep,  are  at  least 
sufficiently  independent  variations  on  the  same  themes.  On  the 
other  hand.  Filer  and  Cute  in  The  Chunes  were  the  first  sketches 
of  Gradgrind  and  Bounderby  in  Hard  Tmies ;  and  Clexnency  in 
The  Battle  of  Life  prefigures  Peggotty  in  David  Copperfeld.  No 
one  could  seriously  quarrel  with  such  repetitions  as  these,  and  there 
are  remarkably  few  of  them ;  for  the  fertile  genius  of  Dickens  took 
delight  in  the  variety  of  its  creativeness,  and,  as  if  to  exemplify 
this,  there  was  no  relation  upon  the  contrasted  humours  of  which 
he  better  loved  to  dwell  than  that  of  partnership.  It  has  been  seen 
how  rarely  his  inventive  power  condescended  to  supplement  itself 
by  what  in  the  novel  corresponds  to  the  mimicry  of  the  stage,  and 


132 


DICKENS, 


what  in  truth  is  as  degrading  to  the  one  as  it  is  to  the  other  —  the 
reproduction  of  originals  fro7n  j'eal  life.  On  the  other  hand,  he 
carries  his  habit  too  far  of  making  a  particular  phrase  do  duty  as  an 
index  of  a  character.  This  trick  also  is  a  trick  of  the  stage,  where 
it  often  enough  makes  the  judicious  grieve.  Many  may  be  inclined 
to  censure  it  in  Dickens  as  one  of  several  forms  of  the  exaggeration 
which  is  so  frequently  condemned  in  him.  There  was  no  charge  to 
which  he  was  more  sensitive  ;  and  in  the  preface  to  Martin  Chtizzle- 
wit  he  accordingly  (not  for  the  first  time)  turned  round  upon  the  ob- 
jectors, declaring  roundly  that  "  what  is  exaggeration  to  one  class  of 
minds  and  perceptions  is  plain  truth  to  another ;  "  and  hinting  a  doubt 
*'  whether  it  is  always  the  writer  who  colours  highly,  or  w^iether  it 
is  now  and  then  the  reader  whose  eye  for  colour  is  a  little  dull.''  I 
certainly  do  not  think  that  the  term  *' exaggerated is  correctly 
applied  to  such  conventional  characters  of  sensational  romance  as 
Rosa  Dartle,  who  has,  as  it  were,  lost  her  way  into  David  Copper- 
Jieldy  while  Hortense  and  Madame  Defarge  seem  to  be  in  their 
proper  places  in  Bleak  House  and  A  Tale  of  Two  Cities.  In  his 
earlier  writings,  and  in  the  fresher  and  less  over-charged  serious 
parts  of  his  later  books,  he  rarely  if  ever  paints  black  in  black ; 
even  the  Jew  Fagin  has  a  moment  of  relenting  against  the  sleeping 
Oliver;  he  is  not  that  unreal  thing,  a  "  demon,"  whereas  Sikes  is 
that  real  thing,  a  brute.  On  the  other  hand,  certainly  he  at  times 
makes  his  characters  more  laughable  than  nature ;  few  great 
humourists  have  so  persistently  sought  to  efface  the  line  which 
separates  the  barely  possible  from  the  morally  probable.  This 
was,  no  doubt,  largely  due  tO  his  inclination  towards  the  grotesque, 
which  a  severer  literary  training  might  have  taught  him  to  restrain. 
Thus  he  liked  to  introduce  insane  or  imbecile  personages  into  fic- 
tion, where,  as  in  real  life,  they  are  often  dangerous  to  handle.  It 
is  to  his  sense  of  the  grotesque,  rather  than  to  any  deep-seated 
satirical  intention,  and  certainly  not  to  any  want  of  reverence  or 
piety  in  his  very  simple  and  very  earnest  nature,  that  I  would  like- 
wise ascribe  the  exaggeration  and  unfairness  Qf  which  he  is  guilty 
against  Little  Bethel  and  all  its  works.  But  in  this,  as  in  other 
instances,  no  form  of  humour  requires  more  delicate  handling  than 
the  grotesque,  and  none  is  more  liable  to  cause  fatigue.  Latterly, 
Dickens  was  always  adding  to  his  gallery  of  eccentric  portraits,  and 
if  inner  currents  may  be  traced  by  outward  signs,  it  may  be  worth 
while  to  apply  the  test  of  his  names,  which  become  more  and  more 
odd  as  their  owners  deviate  more  and  more  from  the  path  of  nature. 
Who  more  simply  and  yet  more  happily  named  than  the  leading 
members  of  the  Pickwick  Club  —  from  the  poet,  Mr.  Snodgrass,  to 
the  sportsman,  Mr.  Winkle — Nathaniel,  not  Daniel;  but  with 
Veneering  and  Lammle,  and  Boffin  and  Venus,  and  Crisparkle  and 
Grewgious  —  be  they  actual  names  or  not  —  we  feel  instinctively 
that  we  are  in  the  region  of  the  transnormal. 

Lastly,  in  their  descriptive  power  and  the  faithfulness  with  which 
they  portray  the  life  and  ways  of  particular  periods  or  countries, 
of  special  classes,  professions,  or  other  divisions  of  mankind,  the 


DICKENS. 


books  of  Dickens  are,  again  of  course  within  their  range,  unequalled. 
He  sought  his  materials  chiefly  at  home,  though  his  letters  from 
Italy  and  Switzerland  and  America,  and  his  French  pictures  in 
sketch  and  story,  show  how  much  wider  a  field  his  descriptive 
powers  might  have  covered.  The  Sketches  by  Boz  and  the  Pick- 
wick Papers  showed  a  mastery,  unsurpassed  before  or  since,  in  the 
description  of  the  life  of  English  society  in  its  middle  and  lower 
classes,  and  in  Oliver  Twist  he  lifted  the  curtain  from  some  of  the 
rotten  parts  of  our  civilisation.  This  history  of  a  work-house  child 
also  sounded  the  note  of  that  sympathy  with  the  poor  which  gave 
to  Dickens's  descriptions  of  their  sufferings  and  their  struggles  a 
veracity  beyond  mere  accuracy  of  detail.  He  was  still  happier  in 
describing  their  household  virtues,  their  helpfulness  to  one  another, 
their  compassion  for  those  who  are  the  poorest  of  all  —  the  friend- 
less and  the  outcast  —  as  he  did  in  his  Old  Curiosity  Shop,  and  in 
most  of  his  Christmas  books.  His  pictures  of  middle-class  life 
abounded  in  kindly  humour ;  but  the  humour  and  pathos  of  pov- 
erty—  more  especially  the  poverty  which  has  not  yet  lost  its  self- 
respect —  commended  themselves  most  of  all  to  his  descriptive 
pov/er.  Where,  as  in  Nicholas  Nickleby  and  later  works,  he  es- 
sayed to  describe  the  manners  of  the  higher  classes,  he  was,  as 
a  rule,  ar  less  successful ;  partly  because  there  was  in  his  nature  a 
vein  of  rebellion  against  the  existing  system  of  society,  so  that, 
except  in  his  latest  books,  he  usually  approached  a  description  of 
members  of  its  dominant  orders  with  a  satirical  intention,  or  at 
least  an  undertone  of  bitterness.  At  the  same  time  I  demur  to  the 
common  assertion  that  Dickens  could  not  draw  a  real  gentleman. 
All  that  can  be  said  is  that  it  very  rarely  suited  his  purpose  to  do 
so,  supposing  the  term  to  include  manners  as  well  as  feelings  and 
actions ;  though  Mr.  Twemlow,  in  Our  Mutual  Frie^id,  might  be 
instanced  as  a  (perhaps  rather  conscious)  exception  of  one  kind, 
and  Sir  Leicester  Dedlock,  in  the  latter  part  of  Bleak  House,  as 
another.  Moreover,  a  closer  examination  of  Lord  Frederick  Veri- 
sopht  and  Cousin  Feenix  will  show  that,  gull  as  the  one  and  ninny 
as  the  other  is,  neither  has  anything  that  can  be  called  ungentle- 
manly  about  him  ;  on  the  contrary,  the  characters,  on  the  whole, 
rather  plead  in  favour  of  the  advantage  than  of  the  valuelessness  of 
blue  blood.  As  for  Dickens's  other  noblemen,  w'hom  I  find  enu- 
merated in  an  American  dictionary  of  his  characters,  they  are  nearly 
all  mere  passing  embodiments  of  satirical  fancies,  which  pretend  to 
be  nothing  more. 

Another  ingenious  enthusiast  has  catalogued  the  numerous  call- 
ings, professions,  and  trades  of  the  personages  appearing  in  Dick- 
ens's works.  I  cannot  agree  with  the  criticism  that  in  his  personages 
the  man  is  apt  to  become  forgotten  in  the  externals  of  his  call- 
ing—  the  barrister's  wig  and  gown,  as  it  were,  standing  for  the 
barrister,  and  the  beadle's  cocked  hat  and  staff  for  the  beadle.  But 
he  must  have  possessed  in  its  perfection  the  curious  detective  faculty 
of  deducing  a  man's  occupation  from  his  manners.  To  him  nothing 
wore  a  neutral  tint,  and  no  man  or  woman  was  featureless.    He  was, 


134 


DICKENS. 


it  should  be  remembered,  always  observing ;  half  his  life  he  was 
afoot.  When  he  undertook  to  describe  any  novel  or  unfamiliar 
kind  of  manners,  he  spared  no  time  or  trouble  in  making  a  special 
study  of  his  subject.  He  was  not  content  to  know  the  haunts  of 
the  London  thieves  by  hearsay,  or  to  read  the  history  of  opium- 
smoking  and  its  effects  in  Blue-books.  From  the  office  of  his 
journal  in  London  we  find  him  starting  on  these  self-imposed  com- 
missions, and  from  his  hotel  in  New  York.  The  whole  art  of  de- 
scriptive reporting,  which  has  no  doubt  produced  a  large  quantity 
of  trashy  writing,  but  has  also  been  of  real  service  in  arousing  a 
public  interest  in  neglected  corners  of  our  social  life,  was,  if  not 
actually  set  on  foot,  at  any  rate  re-invigorated  and  vitalised  by  him. 
No  one  was  so  delighted  to  notice  the  oddities  which  habit  and  tra- 
dition stereotype  in  particular  classes  of  men.  A  complete  natural 
history  of  the  country  actor,  the  London  landlady,  and  the  British 
waiter  might  be  compiled  from  his  pages.  This  power  of  observa- 
tion and  description  extended  from  human  life  to  that  of  animals. 
His  habits  of  life  could  not  but  make  him  the  friend  of  dogs,  and 
there  is  some  reason  for  a  title  which  was  bestowed  on  him  in  a 
paper  in  a  London  magazine  concerning  his  own  dogs  —  the  Land- 
seer  of  Fiction.  His  letters  are  full  of  delightful  details  concerning 
these  friends  and  companions,  Turk,  Linda,  and  the  rest  of  them  ; 
nor  is  the  family  of  their  fictitious  counterparts,  culminating  (intel- 
lectually) in  Merrylegs,  less  numerous  and  delightful.  Cats  were 
less  congenial  to  Dickens,  perhaps  because  he  had  no  objection  to 
changing  house ;  and  they  appear  in  his  works  in  no  more  attractive 
form  than  as  the  attendant  spirits  of  Mrs,  Pipchin  and  of  Mr.  Krook. 
But  for  the  humours  of  animals  in  general  he  had  a  wonderfully 
quick  eye.  Of  his  ravens  I  have  already  spoken.  The  pony  Whis- 
ker is  the  type  of  kind  old  gentlemen's  ponies.  In  one  of  his  letters 
occurs  an  admirably  droll  description  of  the  pig-market  at  Boulogne  ; 
and  the  best  unscientific  description  ever  given  of  a  spider  was 
imagined  by  Dickens  at  Broadstairs,  when  in  his  solilude  he  thought 
"  of  taming  spiders,  as  Baron  Trenck  did.  There  is  one  in  my  cell 
(with  a  speckled  body  and  twenty-two  very  decided  knees)  who 
seems  to  know  me." 

In  everything,  whether  animate  or  inanimate,  he  found  out  at  once 
the  characteristic  feature,  and  reproduced  it  in  words  of  faultless 
precision.  This  is  the  real  secret  of  his  descriptive  power,  the  exer- 
cise of  which  it  would  be  easy  to  pursue  through  many  other  classes 
of  subjects.  Scenery,  for  its  own  sake,  he  rarely  cared  to  describe  ; 
but  no  one  better  understood  how  to  reproduce  the  combined  effect 
of  scenery  and  weather  on  the  predisposed  mind.  Thus  London 
and  its  river  in  especial  are,  as  I  have  said,  haunted  by  the  memory 
of  Dickens's  books.  To  me  it  was  for  years  impossible  to  pass 
near  London  Bridge  at  night,  or  to  idle  in  the  Temple  on  summer 
days,  or  to  frequent  a  hundred  other  localities  on  or  near  the  Thames, 
without  instinctively  recalling  pictures  scattered  through  the  works 
of  Dickens  —  in  this  respect,  also,  a  real  liber  veritatis. 

Thus,  and  in  many  ways  which  it  would  be  labour  lost  to  attempt 


DICKENS. 


I3S 


to  desribe,  and  by  many  a  stroke  or  touch  of  genius  which  it  would 
be  idle  to  seek  to  reproduce  in  paraphrase,  the  most  observing  aiui 
the  most  imaginative  of  our  English  humourists  revealed  to  us  that 
infinite  multitude  of  associations  which  binds  men  together,  and 
makes  us  members  one  of  another.  But  though  observation  and 
imagination  might  discern  and  discover  these  associations,  sympa- 
thy—  the  sympathy  of  a  generous  human  heart  with  humanity  — 
alone  could  breathe  into  them  the  warmth  of  life.  Happily,  to  most 
men,  there  is  one  place  consecrated  above  others  to  the  feelings  of 
love  and  good-will;  *'that  great  altar  where  the  worst  among  us 
sometimes  perform  the  worship  of  the  heart,  and  where  the  best 
have  offered  up  such  sacrifices  and  done  such  deeds  of  heroism  as, 
chronicled,  would  put  the  proudest  temples  of  old  time,  with  all 
their  vaunting  annals,  to  the  blush."  It  was  thus  that  Dickens 
spoke  of  the  sanctity  of  home ;  and,  English  in  many  things,  he 
was  most  English  in  that  love  of  home  to  which  he  was  never 
weary  of  testifying.  But,  though  the  "  pathway  of  the  sublime" 
may  have  been  closed  to  him,  he  knew  well  enough  that  the  inter- 
ests of  a  people  and  the  interests  of  humanity  are  mightier  than  the 
domestic  loves  and  cares  of  any  man  ;  and  he  conscientiously  ad- 
dressed himself,  as  to  the  task  of  his  life,  to  the  endeavour  to  knit 
humanity  together.  The  method  which  he,  by  instinct  and  by 
choice,  more  especially  pursued  was  that  of  seeking  to  show  the 
**good  in  everything."  This  it  is  that  made  him,  unreasonably 
sometimes,  ignobly  never,  the  champion  of  the  poor,  the  helpless, 
the  outcast.  He  was  often  tempted  into  a  rhetoric  too  loud  and  too 
shrill,  into  a  satire  neither  fine  nor  fair ;  for  he  was  impatient,  but 
not  impatient  of  wdiat  he  thought  true  and  good.  His  purpose, 
however,  was  worthy  of  his  powers  ;  nor  is  there  recorded  among 
the  lives  of  English  men  of  letters  any  more  single-minded  in  its 
aim,  and  more  successful  in  the  pursuit  of  it,  than  his.  He  was 
much  criticised  in  his  lifetime ;  and  he  will,  I  am  well  aware,  be 
often  criticised  in  the  future  by  keener  and  more  capable  judges 
than  myself.  They  may  miss  much  in  his  wTitings  that  I  find  in 
them ;  but,  unless  they  find  one  thing  there,  it  were  better  that  they 
never  opened  one  of  his  books.  He  has  indicated  it  himself  when 
criticising  a  literary  performance  by  a  clever  writer :  — 

In  this  little  MS.  everything  is  too  much  patronised  and  condescended  to, 
whereas  the  slightest  touch  of  feeling  for  the  rustic  who  is  of  the  earth  earthy, 
or  of  sisterhood  with  the  homely  servant  who  has  made  her  face  shine  in  her 
desire  to  please,  would  make  a  difference  that  the  writer  can  generally  imagine 
without  trying  it.  You  don't  want  any  sentiment  laboriously  made  out  in  such 
a  thing.  You  don't  want  any  maudlin  show  of  it.  But  you  do  want  a  pervading 
suggestion  that  it  is  there." 

The  sentiment  which  Dickens  means  is  the  salt  which  will  give  a 
fresh  savour  of  their  own  to  his  works  so  long  as  our  language 
endures. 


THE  END. 


SPENSER 

From  an  Original  Picture  in  the  Collection  of  the  Earl  of  KinnouM 


SPENSER 

BY 

R.  W.  CHURCH 

DEAN  OF  ST.  PAUL's 


NOTICE. 


As  the  plan  of  these  volumes  does  not  encourage  foot-notes,  I  wish  to  say 
that,  besides  the  biographies  prefixed  to  the  various  editions  of  Spenser, 
there  are  two  series  of  publications  which  have  been  very  useful  to  me. 
One  is  the  series  of  Calendars  of  State  Papers,  especially  those  on  Ireland 
and  the  Carew  MSS.  at  Lambeth,  with  the  prefaces  of  Mr.  Hans  Claude 
Hamilton  and  the  late  Professor  Brewer.  The  other  is  Mr.  E.  Arber's 
series  of  reprints  of  old  English  books,  and  his  Transcript  of  the  Station- 
ers' Registers — a  work,  I  suppose,  without  parallel  in  its  information  about 
the  early  literature  of  a  country,  and  edited  by  him  with  admirable  care 
and  public  spirit.  I  wish  also  to  say  that  I  am  much  indebted  to  Mr. 
Craik's  excellent  little  book  on  Spenser  and  his  Poetry, 

March,  1879. 


CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER  I. 

Paob. 

Spenser's  early  Life  9 

CHAPTER  H. 

The  new  Poet — The  Shepherd's  Calendar    .      ,      .  .26 
CHAPTER  in. 

Spenser  in  Ireland  •      •  39 

CHAPTER  IV. 

The  Faerie  Queene— The  First  Part  57 

CHAPTER  V. 

The  Faerie  Queene   81 

CHAPTER  VI. 

Second  Part  of  the  Faerie  Queene—Spenser's  last  Years 
(1 590-1 599)  ,      o  109 


SPENSER. 


CHAPTER  I. 

SPri:NSER*S  EARLY  LIFE. 
[1552-1579-] 

Spenser  marks  a  beginning  in  English  literature.  He  was  the 
first  Englishman  who,  in  that  great  division  of  our  history  which 
dates  from  the  Reformation,  attempted  and  achieved  a  poetical 
work  of  the  highest  order.  Born  about  the  same  time  as  Hooker 
(1552-1554),  in  the  middle  of  that  eventful  century  which  began 
with  Henry  VIII.,  and  ended  with  Elizabeth,  he  was  the  earlies^ 
of  our  great  modern  writers  in  poetry,  as  Hooker  was  the  earliest 
of  the  great  modern  writers  in  prose.  In  that  reviving  English 
literature,  which,  after  Chaucer's  wonderful  promise,  had  been 
arrested  in  its  progress,  first  by  the  Wars  of  the  Roses,  and  then 
by  the  religious  troubles  of  the  Reformation,  these  two  were  the 
writers  who  first  realised  to  Englishmen  the  ideas  of  a  high 
literary  perfection.  These  ideas  vaguely  filled  many  minds  ;  but 
no  one  had  yet  shown  the  genius  and  the  strength  to  grasp  and 
exhibit  them  in  a  way  to  challenge  comparison  with  what  had  been 
accomplished  by  the  poetry  and  prose  of  Greece,  Rome,  and  Italy. 
There  had  been  poets  in  England  since  Chaucer,  and  prose-writers 
since  Wychffe  had  translated  the  Bible.  Surrey  and  Wyatt  had 
deserved  to  live,  while  a  crowd  of  poets,  as  ambitious  as  they,  and 
not  incapable  of  occasional  force  and  sweetness,  have  been  forgot- 
ten. Sir  Thomas  More,  Roger  Ascham,  Tyndale,  the  translator 
of  the  New  Testament,  Bishop  Latimer,  the  writers  of  many  state 
documents,  and  the  framers,  either  by  translation  or  composition, 
of  the  offices  of  the  English  Prayer-Book,  showed  that  they  under- 
stood the  power  of  the  English  language  over  many  of  the  sub- 
tleties and  difficulties  of  thought,  and  were  alive  to  the  music  of 
its  cadences.  Some  of  these  works,  consecrated  by  the  highest  of 
all  possible  associations,  have  remained,  permanent  monuments 
and  standards  of  the  most  majestic  and  most  affecting  English 
speech.  But  the  verse  of  Surrey,  Wyatt,  and  Sackville,  and  tlie 
prose  of  More  and  Ascham,  were  but  noble  and  promising  efforis. 
Perhaps  the  language  was  not  ripe  for  their  success;  perhaps  ih^i 


lO 


SPEA^SER. 


craftsmen's  strength  and  experience  were  not  equal  to  the  novelty 
of  their  attempt.  But  no  one  can  compare  the  English  style  of 
the  first  half  of  the  sixteenth  century  with  the  contemporary  styles 
of  Italy,  with  Ariosto,  Machiavelli,  Guicciardini,  without  feeling 
the  immense  gap  in  point  of  culture,  practice,  and  skill — the  im- 
mense distance  at  which  the  Italians  were  ahead,  in  the  finish  and 
reach  of  their  instruments,  in  their  power  to  handle  them,  in  com- 
mand over  their  resources,  and  facility  and  ease  in  using  them. 
The  Italians  were  more  than  a  century  older ;  the  English  could 
not  yet,  like  the  Italians,  say  what  they  would;  the  strength  of 
English  was,  doubtless,  there  in  germ,  but  it  had  still  to  reach  its 
full  growth  and  development.  Even  the  French  prose  of  Rabelais 
and  Montaigne  was  more  mature.  But  in  Spenser,  as  in  Hooker, 
all  these  tentative  essays  of  vigorous  but  unpractised  minds  have 
led  up  to  great  and  lasting  works.  We  have  forgotten  all  these 
preliminary  attempts,  crude  and  imperfect,  to  speak  with  force  and 
truth,  or  to  sing  with  measure  and  grace.  There  is  no  reason  why 
they  should  be  remembered,  except  by  professed  inquirers  into  the 
antiquities  of  our  literature  ;  they  were  usually  clumsy  and  awk- 
ward, sometimes  grotesque,  often  affected,  always  hopelessly  want- 
ing in  the  finish,  breadth,  moderation,  and  order  which  alone  can 
give  permanence  to  wTiting.  They  were  the  necessary  exercises 
by  which  Englishmen  were  recovering  the  suspended  art  of 
Chaucer,  and  learning  to  write  ;  and  exercises,  though  indispen- 
sably necessary,  are  not  ordinarily  in  themselves  interesting  and 
admirable.  But  when  the  exercises  had  been  duly  gone  through, 
then  arose  the  original  and  powerful  minds,  to  take  full  advantage 
of  what  had  been  gained  by  all  the  practising,  and  to  concentrate 
and  bring  to  a  focus  all  the  hints  and  lessons  of  art  which  had 
been  gradually  accumulating.  Then  the  sustained  strength  and 
richness  of  the  Faerie  Queene  became  possible  ;  contemporary 
with  it,  the  grandeur  and  force  of  English  prose  began  in  Hooker's 
Ecclesiastical  Polity ;  and  then,  in  the  splendid  Elizabethan 
Drama,  that  form  of  art  which  has  nowhere  a  rival,  the  highest 
powers  of  poetic  imagination  became  wedded,  as  they  had  never 
been  before  in  England  or  in  the  world,  to  the  real  facts  of  human 
life,  and  to  its  deepest  thoughts  and  passions. 

More  is  known  about  the  circumstances  of  Spenser's  life  than 
about  the  lives  of  many  men  of  letters  of  that  time  ;  yet  our  knowl- 
edge is  often  imperfect  and  inaccurate.  The  year  1552  is  now 
generally  accepted  as  the  year  of  his  birth.  The  date  is  inferred 
From  a  passage  in  one  of  his  Sonnets,*  and  this  probably  is  near 
the  truth.  That  is  to  say,  that  Spenser  was  born  in  one  of  the 
last  two  years  of  Edward  VI.;  that  his  infancy  was  passed  during 
the  dark  days  of  Mary  ;  and  that  he  was  about  six  years  old  when 

 <t  Since  the  winged  god  his  planet  clear 

Began  in  me  to  move,  one  year  is  spent : 
The  which  doth  longer  unto  me  appear 
Than  all  those  forty  which  my  life  outwent.'* 

Somiet  La.,  probably  written  in  1593  or  1594. 


SPENSER. 


Elizabeth  came  to  the  throne.  About  the  same  time  were  born 
Raleio^h,  and,  a  year  or  two  later  (1554),  Hooker  and  Phih'p  Sidney. 
Bncon  (i  561),  and  Shakespere  (1564),  belong  to  the  next  decade 
of  the  century. 

He  was  certainly  a  Londoner  by  birth  and  early  training.  Thifi 
also  we  learn  from  himself,  in  the  latest  poem  published  in  his  life- 
time. It  is  a  bridal  ode  [Prothalamion]^  to  celebrate  the  marriage 
of  two  daughters  of  the  Earl  of  Worcester,  written  late  in  1596. 
It  was  a  time  in  his  life  of  disappointment  and  trouble,  when  he 
was  only  a  rare  visitor  to  London.  In  the  poem  he  imagines  him- 
self on  the  banks  of  London's  great  river,  and  the  bridal  procession 
arriving  at  Lord  Essex's  house ;  and  he  takes  occasion  to  record 
the  affection  with  which  he  still  regarded  "  the  most  kindly  nurse  " 
of  his  boyhood. 

"Calm  was  the  day,  and  through  the  trembling  air 

Sweet-breathing  Zephyrus  did  softly  play, 

A  gentle  spirit,  that  lightly  did  delay 

Hot  Titan's  beams,  which  then  did  glister  fair : 

When  I,  (whom  sullen  care. 

Through  discontent  of  my  long  fruitless  stay 

In  Princes  Court,  and  expectation  vain 

Of  idle  hopes,  which  still  do  fly  away, 

Like  empty  shadows,  did  afflict  my  brain,) 

Walkt  forth  to  ease  my  pain 

Along  the  shore  of  silver-streaming  Thames; 

Whose  rutty  bank,  the  which  his  river  hems, 

Was  painted  all  wdth  variable  flowers, 

And  all  the  meads  adorned  with  dainty  gems 

Fit  to  deck  maidens'  bowers, 

And  crown  their  paramours 
Against  the  bridal  day,  which  is  not  long : 
Sweet  Thames  !  run  softly,  till  I  end  my  song. 

*****  in 

At  length  they  all  to  vierry  London  came, 

To  merry  Lo7idon,  my  most  kindly  nurse j 

That  to  me  gave  this  life's  first  native  source^ 

Though  from  another  place  I  take  my  name, 

A  house  of  ancient  fame. 

There,  when  they  came,  whereas  those  bricky  towers 

The  which  on  Thames  broad  aged  hack  do  ride, 

Where  now  the  studious  lawyers  have  their  bowers, 

There  whilome  wont  the  Templar  Knights  to  bide, 

Till  they  decayed  through  pride  : 

Next  whereunto  there  stands  a  stately  place, 

Where  oft  I  gained  gifts  and  goodly  grace  * 

Of  that  great  Lord,  zuhich  therein  wont  to  dwell ; 

Whose  want  too  well  no^v  feels  my  friendless  case  ; 

But  ah  !  here  fits  not  well 

Old  woes,  but  Joys,  to  tell 

Against  the  bridal  day,  which  is  not  long: 

Sweet  Thames  !  run  softly,  till  I  end  my  song: 

*  Leicester  House,  then  Essex  House,  in  the  Strand. 


±2 


SPENSER. 


Yet  therein  now  doth  lodge  a  noble  peer,* 

Great  England's  glory  and  the  wide  world's  wonder, 

Whose  dreadful  name  late  through  all  Spain  did  thunder, 

And  Hercules  two  pillars,  standing  near, 

Did  make  to  quake  and  fear. 

Fair  branch  of  honour,  flower  of  chivalry  ! 

That  fillest  England  with  thy  triumph's  fame, 

Joy  have  thou  of  thy  noble  victory,! 

And  endless  happiness  of  thine  own  name 

That  promiseth  the  same. 

That  through  thy  prowess,  and  victorious  arms, 
Thy  country  may  be  freed  from  foreign  harms  ; 
And  great  Ellsa's  glorious  name  may  ring 
Through  all  the  world,  filled  with  thy  wide  alarms." 

Who  his  father  was,  and  what  was  his  employment,  we  know 
not.  From  one  of  the  poems  of  his  later  years  we  learn  that  his 
mother  bore  the  famous  name  of  Elizabeth,  which  was  also  the 
cherished  one  of  Spenser's  wife. 

My  love,  my  life's  best  ornament, 
By  whom  my  spirit  out  of  dust  was  raised.'*  % 

But  his  family,  whatever  was  his  father's  condition,  certainly 
claimed  kindred,  though  there  was  a  difference  in  the  spelling  of 
the  name,  with  a  house  then  rising  into  fame  and  importance,  the 
Spencers  of  Althorpe,  the  ancestors  of  the  Spencers  and  Churchills 
of  modern  days.  Sir  John  Spencer  had  several  daughters,  three  of 
whom  made  great  marriages.  Elizabeth  was  the  wife  of  Sir  George 
Carey,  afterwards  the  second  Lord  Hunsdon,  the  son  of  Elizabeth's 
cousin  and  Counsellor.  Anne,  first,  Lady  Compton,  afterwards 
married  Thomas  Sackville,  the  son  of  the  poet,  Lord  Buckhurst, 
and  then  Earl  of  Dorset.  Alice,  the  youngest,  whose  first  husband, 
Lord  Strange,  became  Earl  of  Derby,  after  his  death  married 
Thomas  Egerton,  Lord  Keeper,  Baron  Ellesmere,  and  then  Vis- 
count Brackley.  These  three  sisters  are  celebrated  by  him  in  a 
gallery  of  the  noble  ladies  of  the  Court,  §  under  poetical  names — 
Phillis,  the  flower  of  rare  perfection  ;  "  "  Charillis,  the  pride  and 
primrose  of  the  rest :  "  and  "  Sweet  Amaryllis,  the  youngest  but 
the  highest  in  degree."  Alice,  Lady  Strange,  Lady 'Derby,  Lady 
Ellesmere  and  Brackley,  and  then  again  Dowager  Lady  Derby, 
the  "Sweet  Amaryllis  "  of  the  poet,  had  the  rare  fortune  to  be'a 
personal  link  between  Spenser  and  Milton.  She  was  among  the 
last  whom  Spenser  honoured  with  his  homage  :  and  she  was  the 
first  whom  Milton  honoured ;  for  he  composed  his  Arcades  to  be 
acted  before  her  by  her  grandchildren,  and  the  Masque  of  Co7nus 
for  her  son-in-law,  Lord  Bridge  water,  and  his  daughter,  another 
Lady  Alice.  With  these  illustrious  sisters  Spenser  claimed  kin- 
drecl.    To  each  of  these  he  dedicated  one  of  his  minor  poems  ;  to 


♦  Earl  of  Esnex.  t  At  Cadiz,  June  21.  1596.  X  Soniict  LXXIV. 

§  Colin  Clo?4l''s  come  Home  again,  1.  536.    Craik,  SJ>enser,  i.  9,  10. 


SPENSER. 


13 


Lady  Stranpje,  the  Tears  of  the  Muses ;  to  Lady  Coinpton,  the 
Apologue  of  the  Fox  and  the  Ape,  Mother  Iluhberd's  Tale;  to 
Lady  Carey,  the  Fable  of  the  Butterfly  and  the  Spider,  Muiopotmos. 
And  in  each  dedication  he  assumed  on  their  part  the  recognition  of 
his  claim. 

The  sisters  three, 
The  honour  of  the  noble  family, 
Of  which  I  meanest  boast  myself  to  be." 

Whatever  his  degree  of  relationship  to  them,  he  could  hardly, 
even  in  the  days  of  his  fame,  have  ventured  thus  publicly  to  chal- 
lenge it,  unless  there  had  been  some  acknowledged  ground  for  it. 
There  are  obscure  indications,  which  antiquarian  diligence  may 
perhaps  make  clear,  which  point  to  East  Lancashire  as  the  home 
of  the  particular  family  of  Spensers  to  which  Edmund  Spenser's 
father  belonged.  Probably  he  was,  however,  in  humble  circum- 
stances. 

Edmund  Spenser  was  a  Londoner  by  education  as  well  as  birth. 
A  recent  discovery  by  Mr.  R.  B.  Knowles,  further  illustrated  by 
Dr.  Grosart,*  has  made  us  acquainted  with  Spenser's  school.  He 
was  a  pupil,  probably  one  of  the  earliest  ones,  of  the  grammar 
school,  then  recently  (1560)  established  by  the  Merchant  Taylors' 
Company,  under  a  famous  teacher,  Dr.  Mulcaster.  Among  the 
manuscripts  at  Townley  Hall  are  preserved  the  account  books  of 
the  executors  of  a  bountiful  London  citizen,  Robert  Nowell,  the 
brother  of  Dr.  Alexander  Nowell,  who  w^as  Dean  of  St.  Paul's 
during  Elizabeth's  reign,  and  was  a  leading  person  in  the  ecclesias- 
tical affairs  of  the  time.  In  these  books,  in  a  crowd  of  unknown 
names  of  needy  relations  and  dependents,  distressed  foreigners, 
and  parish  paupers,  who  shared  from  time  to  time  the  liberality  of 
Mr.  Robert  Nowell's  representatives,  there  appeared  among  the 
numerous  "  poor  scholars  "  whom  his  wealth  assisted,  the  names 
of  Richard  Hooker  and  Lancelot  Andrewes.  And  there,  also,  in 
the  roll  of  the  expenditure  at  Mr.  Nowell's  pompous  funeral  at  St. 
Paul's  in  February,  I56|,  among  long  lists  of  unknown  men  and 
women,  high  and  low,  who  had  mourning  given  them,  among  bills 
for  fees  to  officials,  for  undertakers'  charges,  for  heraldic  pageantry 
and  ornamentation,  for  abundant  supplies  for  the  sumptuous 
funeral  banquet,  are  put  down  lists  of  boys,  from  the  chief  London 
schools,  St.  Paul's,  Westminster,  and  others,  to  whom  two  yards  of 
cloth  were  to  be  given  to  make  their  gowns  :  and  at  the  head  of 
the  six  scholars  named  from  Merchant  Taylors'  is  the  name  of 
Edmund  Spenser. 

He  was  then,  probably,  the  senior  boy  of  the  school,  and  in  the 
following  May  he  went  to  Cambridge.  The  Nowells  still  helped 
him:  we  read  in  their  account  books  under  April  28,  1569,  "to 
Edmond  Spensore,  scholler  of  the  m'chante  tayler  scholl,  at  his 
gowinge  to  penbrocke  hall  in  chambridge,  xs."  On  the  20th  of  May, 

*  See  The  Sp^ndin^  of  the  Money  of  Robert  Nowell^  156S-1580  :  from  the  MSS.  aj 
Townley  Hall.    Edited  by  Rev.  A-  B.  Grosart.  1877. 


SPENSER. 


he  was  admitted  sizar,  or  serving  clerk  at  Pembroke  Hall ;  and  on 
more  than  one  occasion  afterwards,  like  Hooker  and  hke  Lancelot 
Andrewes,  also  a  Merchant  Taylors'  boy,  two  or  three  years  Spen- 
sers'  junior,  and  a  member  of  the  same  college,  Spenser  had  a 
share  in  the  benefactions,  small  in  themselves,  but  very  numerous, 
with  which  the  Nowells,  after  the  fine  fashion  of  the  time,  were 
accustomed  to  assist  poor  scholars  at  the  Universities.  In 
the  visitations  of  Merchant  Taylors'  School,  at  which  Grindal, 
Bishop  of  London,  v/as  frequently  present,*  it  is  not  unlikely  that 
his  interest  was  attracted,  in  the  appositions  or  examinations,  to 
the  premising  senior  boy  of  the  school.  At  any  rate,  Spenser, 
who  afterwards  celebrated  Grindal's  qualities  as  a  bishop,  was  ad- 
mitted to  a  place,  one  which  befitted  a  scholar  in  humble  circum- 
stances, in  Grindal's  old  college.  It  is  perhaps  worth  noticing  that 
all  Spenser's  early  friends,  Grindal,  the  Nowells,  Dr.  Mulcaster, 
his  master,  were  north  country  men. 

Spenser  was  sixteen  or  seventeen  when  he  left  school  for  the 
university,  and  he  entered  Cambridge  at  the  time  when  the  strug- 
gle which  was  to  occupy  the  reign  of  Ehzabeth  was  just  opening. 
At  the  end  of  the  year  1569,  the  first  distinct  blow  was  struck 
against  the  queen  and  the  new  settlement  of  religion,  by  the  Rising 
of  the  North.  In  the  first  ten  years  of  Elizabeth's  reign,  Spenser's 
scliool-time  at  Merchant  Taylors',  the  great  quarrel  had  slumbered. 
Events  abroad  occupied  men's  minds  ;  the  religious  wars  in  France, 
the  death  of  the  Duke  of  Guise  (1563),  the  loss  of  Havre,  and  ex- 
pulsion of  the  English  garrisons,  the  close  of  the  Council  of  Trent 
(1563),  the  French  peace,  the  accession  of  Pius  V.  (i 56f).  Nearer 
home,  there  was  the  marriage  of  Mary  of  Scotland  with  Henry 
Darnley  (1565),  and  all  the  tragedy  which  followed,  Kirk  of  Field 
{1567),  Lochleven,  Langside,  Carlisle,  the  imprisonment  of  the 
pretender  to  the  English  Crown  (i  568).  In  England,  the  authority 
of  Elizabeth  had  established  itself,  and  the  internal  organisation  of 
tlie  Reformed  Church  was  going  on,  in  an  uncertain  and  tentative 
way,  but  steadily.  There  was  a  struggle  between  Genevan  exiles, 
who  were  for  going  too  fast,  and  bishops  and  politicians,  who  were 
for  going  too  slow ;  between  authority  and  individual  judgment, 
between  home-born  state  traditions  and  foreign  revolutionary  zeal. 
But  outwardly,  at  least,  England  had  been  peaceful.  Now,  how- 
ever, a  great  change  was  at  hand.  In  1566,  the  Dominican  In- 
quisitor, Michael  Ghislieri,  was  elected  Pope,  under  the  title  of 
Pius  V. 

In  Pius  (1566-72)  were  embodied  the  new  spirit  and  policy  of 
the  Roman  Church,  as  they  had  been  created  and  moulded  by  the 
great  Jesuit  order,  and  by  reforming  bishops  like  Ghiberti  of 
Verona,  and  Carlo  Borromeo  of  Milan.  Devout  and  self-denying 
as  a  saint,  fierce  and  inflexible  against  abuses  as  a  puritan,  reso- 
lute and  uncompromising  as  a  Jacobin  idealist  or  an  Asiatic  des- 
pot, ruthless  and  inexorable  as  an  executioner,  his  soul  was  bent 


*  H.  B.  V/ilson,  Hist,  of  Merchant  Taylors''  School^  p.  23. 


SPENSER. 


on  re-establishing,  not  only  by  preaching  and  martyrdom,  but  by 
the  sword  and  by  the  stake,  the  unity  of  Christendom  and  of  its 
belief.  Eastwards  and  westwards,  he  beheld  two  formidable  foes 
and  two  serious  dangers  ;  and  he  saw  before  him  the  task  of  Lis 
life  in  the  heroic  work  of  crushing  English  heresy  and  beating 
back  Turkish  misbelief.  He  broke  through  the  temporising  cau- 
tion of  his  predecessors  by  the  Bull  of  Deposition  against  Eliz- 
abeth in  1570.  He  was  the  soul  of  the  confederacy  which  won  tlie 
day  of  Lepanto  against  the  Ottomans  in  1571.  And  though  dead, 
his  spirit  was  paramount  in  the  slaughter  of  St.  Bartholomew  in 
1572. 

In  the  year  1569,  while  Spenser  was  passing  from  school  to 
college,  his  emissaries  were  already  in  England,  spreading  abroad 
that  Elizabeth  was  a  bastard  and  an  apostate,  incapable  of  filling  a 
Christian  throne,  which  belonged  by  right  to  the  captive  Mary. 
The  seed  they  sowed  bore  fruit.  In  the  end  of  the  year,  southern 
England  was  alarmed  by  the  news  of  the  rebellion  of  the  two  great 
Earls  in  the  north,  Percy  of  Northumberland  and  Neville  of  West- 
moreland. Durham  was  sacked,  and  the  mass  restored  by  an  in- 
surgent host,  before  which  an  "  aged  gentleman,"  Richard  Norton 
with  his  sons,  bore  the  banner  of  the  Five  Wounds  of  Christ.  The 
rebellion  was  easily  put  down,  and  the  revenge  was  stern.  To  the 
men  who  had  risen  at  the  instigation  of  the  Pope  and  the  cause  of 
Mary,  Elizabeth  gave,  as  she  had  sworn,  such  a  breakfast  as 
never  was  in  the  North  before.'*  The  hangman  finished  the  work 
on  those  who  had  escaped  the  sword.  Poetry,  early  and  late,  has 
recorded  the  dreary  fate  of  those  brave  victims  of  a  mistaken  cause, 
in  the  ballad  of  the  Risi7tg  of  the  North,  and  in  the  White  Doe  oj 
Rylstone.  It  was  the  signal  given  for  the  internecine  war  which 
was  to  follow  between  Rome  and  Elizabeth.  And  it  was  the  first 
great  public  event  which  Spenser  would  hear  of  in  all  men's  mouths, 
as  he  entered  on  manhood,  the  prelude  and  augury  of  fierce  and 
dangerous  years  to  come.  The  nation  awoke  to  the  certainty — 
one  which  so  profoundly  affects  sentiment  and  character  both  in  a 
nation  and  in  an  individual — that  among  the  habitual  and  fixed 
conditions  of  life  is  that  of  having  a  serious  and  implacable  enemy 
ever  to  reckon  with. 

And  in  this  year,  apparently  in  the  transition-time  between 
school  and  college,  Spenser's  literary  ventures  began.  The  evi- 
dence is  curious,  but  it  seems  to  be  clear.  In  1 569,  a  refugee 
Flemish  physician  from  Antwerp,  who  had  fled  to  England  from 
the  "  abominations  of  the  Roman  Antichrist"  and  the  persecu- 
tions of  the  Duke  of  Alva,  John  Vander  Noodt,  published  one  of 
those  odd  miscellanies,  fashionable  at  the  time,  half  moral  and 
poetical,  half  fiercely  polemical,which  he  called  a  "  Theatre,  wherein 
he  represented  as  well  the  Miseries  and  Calamities  which  follow 
the  voluptuous  Worldlings,  as  also  the  great  Joys  and  Pleasures 
which  the  Faithful  do  enjoy — an  argument  both  profitable  and  de- 
lectable to  all  that  sincerely  love  the  word  of  God."  This  "  little 
treatise  "  was  a  mixture  of  verse  and  prose,  setting  forth,  in  gen* 


i6 


SPENSER. 


eral,  the  vanity  of  the  world,  and,  in  particular,  predictions  of  the 
ruin  of  Rome  and  Antichrist :  and  it  enforced  its  lessons  by  illus- 
trative woodcuts.  In  this  strange  jumble  are  preserved,  we  can 
scarcely  doubt,  the  first  compositions  which  we  know  of  Spenser's. 
Among  the  pieces  are  some  Sonnets  of  Petrarch,  and  some  Vis- 
ions of  the  French  poet  Joachim  du  Bellay,  whose  poems  were 
published  in  1 568.  In  the  collection  itself,  these  pieces  are  said 
by  the  compiler  to  have  been  translated  by  him  "  out  of  the  Brab- 
ants  speech,"  and  "  out  of  Dutch  into  English."  But  in  a  volume 
of  "poems  of  the  world's  vanity,"  and  published  years  afterwards 
in  1591,  ascribed  to  Spenser,  and  put  together,  apparently  with  his 
consent,  by  his  publisher,  are  found  these  very  pieces  from  Pe- 
trarch and  Du  Bellay.  The  translations  from  Petrarch  are  almost 
literally  the  same,  and  are  said  to  have  been  ^' formerly  translated." 
In  the  Visions  of  Du  Bellay  there  is  this  difference,  that  the  earlier 
translations  are  in  blank  verse,  and  the  later  ones  are  rimed  as 
sonnets  ;  but  the  change  does  not  destroy  the  manifest  identity  of 
the  two  translations.  So  that  unless  Spenser's  publisher,  to  whom 
the  poet  had  certainly  given  some  of  his  genuine  pieces  for  the 
volume,  is  not  to  be  trusted — which,  of  course,  is  possible,  but  not 
probable — or  unless — what  is  in  the  last  degree  inconceivable — 
Spenser  had  afterwards  been  willing  to  take  the  trouble  of  turning 
the  blank  verse  of  Du  Bellay's  unknown  translator  into  rime,  the 
Dutchman  who  dates  his  Theat7'e  of  Wo7'ldlings  on  the  25th  May, 
1569,  must  have  employed  the  promising  and  fluent  school-boy, 
to  furnish  him  with  an  English  versified  form,  of  which  he  himself 
took  the  credit,  for  compositions  which  he  professes  to  have  known 
only  in  the  Brabants  or  Dutch  translations.  The  sonnets  from 
Petrarch  are  translated  with  much  command  of  language  ;  there 
occurs  in  them,  what  was  afterwards  a  favourite  thought  of 
Spenser's ; 

— The  Nymphs, 
That  sweetly  in  accord  did  tune  their  voice 
To  the  soft  sounding  of  the  waters'^  fall.'''*  * 

It  is  scarcely  credible  that  the  translator  of  the  sonnets  could  have 
caught  so  much  as  he  has  done  of  the  spirit  of  Petrarch  without 
having  been  able  to  read  the  Italian  original ;  and  if  Spenser  was 
the  translator,  it  is  a  curious  illustration  of  the  fashionableness  of 
Italian  literature  in  the  days  of  Elizabeth,  that  a  school-boy  just 
leaving  Merchant  Taylors'  should  have  been  so  much  interested 
in  it.  Dr.  Mulcaster,  his  master,  is  said  by  Warton  to  have  given 
special  attention  to  the  teaching  of  the  English  language. 

If  these  translations  were  Spenser's,  he  must  have  gone  to 
Cambridge  with  a  faculty  of  verse,  which  for  his  time  may  be 
compared  to  that  with  which  winners  of  prize  poems  go  to  the 
universities  now.  But  there  was  this  difference,  that  the  school- 
boy versifiers  of  our  days  are  rich  with  the  accumulated  experience 
and  practice  of  the  most  varied  and  magnificent  poetical  litera 

*  Comp.  Shep  Cah  April  1.  36.  June  1.  8.  F.  Q.  6.  10.  7, 


SPENSER. 


17 


ture  in  the  world  ;  while  Spenser  had  but  one  really  great  English 
model  behind  him;  and  Chaucer,  honoured  as  he  was,  had  become 
in  Elizabeth's  time,  if  not  obsolete,  yet  in  his  diction,  very  far 
removed  from  the  living  language  of  the  day.  Even  Milton, 
in  his  boyish  compositions,  wrote  after  Spenser  and  Shakes- 
peare, with  their  contemporaries,  had  created  modern  English 
poetry.  Whatever  there  was  in  Spenser's  early  verses  of  grace 
and  music  was  of  his  own  finding :  no  one  in  his  own  time,  except 
in  occasional  and  fitful  snatches,  like  stanzas  of  Sackville's,  had 
shown  him  the  way.  Thus  equipped,  he  entered  the  student 
world,  then  full  of  pedantic  and  ill-applied  learning,  of  the  disputa- 
tions of  Calvinistic  theology,  and  of  the  beginnings  of  those  highly 
speculative  puritanical  controversies,  which  were  the  eclio  at  the 
University  of  the  great  political  struggles  of  the  day,  and  were 
soon  to  become  so  seriously  practical.  The  University  was  rep- 
resented to  the  authorities  in  London  as  beingina  state  of  danger- 
ous excitement,  troublesome  and  mutinous.  Whitgift,  afterwards 
Elizabeth's  favourite  archbishop,  Master,  first  of  Pembroke,  and 
then  of  Trinity,  was  Vice-Chancellor  of  the  University  ;  but,  as  the 
guardian  of  established  order,  he  found  it  difficult  to  keep  in  check 
the  violent  and  revolutionary  spirit  of  the  theological  schools. 
Calvin  was  beginning  to  be  set  up  there  as  the  infallible  doctor  of 
Protestant  theology.  Cartwright  from  the  Margaret  Professor's 
chair  was  teaching  the  exclusive  and  divine  claims  of  the  Geneva 
platform  of  discipline,  and  in  defiance  of  the  bishops  and  the  gov- 
ernment was  denouncing  the  received  Church  polity  and  ritual  as 
Popish  and  anti-Christian.  Cartwright,  an  extreme  and  uncompro- 
mising man,  was  deprived  in  1570;  but  the  course  which  things 
were  taking  under  the  influence  of  Rome  and  Spain  gave  force  to  his 
lessons  and  warnings,  and  strengthened  his  party.  In  this  turmoil 
of  opinions,  amid  these  hard  and  technical  debates,  these  fierce 
conflicts  between  the  highest  authorities,  and  this  unsparing  vio- 
lence and  bitterness  of  party  recriminations,  Spenser,  with  the 
tastes  and  faculties  of  a  poet,  and  the  love  not  only  of  what  was 
beautiful,  but  of  what  was  meditative  and  dreamy,  began  his  uni- 
versity life. 

It  was  not  a  favourable  atmosphere  for  the  nurture  of  a  great 
poet.  But  it  suited  one  side  of  Spenser's  mind,  as  it  suited  that 
of  all  but  the  most  independent  Englishmen  of  the  time — Shake- 
spere.  Bacon,  Raleigh.  Little  is  known  of  Spenser's  Cambridge 
career.  It  is  probable,  from  the  persons  with  whom  he  was  con- 
nected, that  he  would  not  be  indifferent  to  the  debates  around  him, 
and  that  his  religious  prepossessions  were  then,  as  afterwards,  in 
favour  of  the  conforming  puritanism  in  the  Church,  as  opposed  to 
the  extreme  and  thorough-going  puritanism  of  Cartwright.  Of  the 
conforming  puritans,  who  would  have  been  glad  of  a  greater  approx- 
imation to  the  Swiss  model,  but  who,  whatever  their  private  wishes 
or  dislikes,  thought  it  best,  for  good  reasons  or  bad,  to  submit  to 
the  strong  determination  of  the  government  against  it,  and  to  accept 
what  the  government  approved  and  imposed,  Grindal,  who  held 

2 


i8 


SPENSER, 


successively  the  great  sees  of  London,  York,  and  Canterbury,  and 
Novvell,  Dean  of  St.  Paul's,  Spenser's  benefactor,  were  representa-. 
tive  types.  Grindal,  a  waverer  like  many  others  in  opinion,  had 
also  a  noble  and  manly  side  to  his  character,  in  his  hatred  of  practi< 
cal  abuses,  and  in  the  courageous  and  obstinate  resistance  which 
he  could  offer  to  power,  when  his  sense  of  right  was  outraged. 
Grindal,  as  has  been  said,  was  perhaps  instrumental  in  getting  Spen- 
ser into  his  own  old  college,  Pembroke  Hall,  with  the  intention,  it 
may  be,  as  was  the  fashion  of  bishops  of  that  time,  of  becoming  his 
patron.  But  certainly  after  his  disgrace  in  1 577,  and  when  it  was 
not  quite  safe  to  praise  a  great  man  under  the  displeasure  of  the 
Court,  Grindal  is  the  person  whom  Spenser  first  singled  out  for  his 
warmest  and  heartiest  praise.  He  is  introduced  under  a  thin  dis- 
guise, Algrind,"  in  Spenser's  earliest  work  after  he  left  Cambridge, 
the  Shcphera  s  Calendar^  as  the  pattern  of  the  true  and  faithful 
Christian  pastor.  And  if  Pembroke  Hall  retained  at  all  the  tone 
and  tendencies  of  such  masters  as  Ridley,  Grindal,  and  Whitgift, 
the  school  in  which  Spenser  grew  up  was  one  of  their  mitigated 
puritanism.  But  his  puritanism  was  political  and  national,  rather 
than  religious.  He  went  heartily  with  the  puritan  party  in  their  in- 
tense hatred  of  Rome  and  Roman  partisans  ;  he  went  with  them 
also  in  their  denunciations  of  the  scandals  and  abuses  of  the  ecclesi- 
astical government  at  home.  But  in  temper  of  mind  and  intellect- 
ual bias  he  had  little  in  common  with  the  puritans.  For  the  stern 
austerities  of  Calvinism,  its  fierce  and  eager  scholasticism,  its  iso- 
lation from  human  history,  human  enjoyment,  and  all  the  manifold 
play  and  variety  of  human  character,  there  could  not  be  much  sym- 
pathy in  a  man  like  Spenser,  with  his  easy  and  flexible  nature, 
keenly  alive  to  all  beauty,  an  admirer  even  when  he  was  not  a  lover 
of  the  alluring  pleasures  of  which  the  world  is  full,  with  a  perpetual 
struggle  going  on  in  him,  between  his  strong  instincts  of  purity  and 
right,  and  his  passionate  appreciation  of  every  charm  and  grace. 
He  shows  no  signs  of  agreement  with  the  internal  characteristics 
of  the  puritans,  their  distinguishing  theology,  their  peculiarities  of 
thought  and  habits,  their  protests,  right  or  wrong,  against  the  fash- 
ions and  amusements  of  the  world.  If  not  a  man  of  pleasure,  he 
yet  threw  himself  without  scruple  into  the  tastes,  the  language,  the 
pursuits,  of  the  gay  and  gallant  society  in  which  they  saw  so  much 
evil :  and  from  their  narrow  view  of  life,  and  the  contempt,  dislike, 
and  fear  with  which  they  regarded  the  whole  field  of  human  interest, 
he  certainly  was  parted  by  the  widest  gulf.  Indeed,  he  had  not  the 
sternness  and  concentration  of  purpose,  which  made  Milton  the 
great  puritan  poet. 

Spenser  took  his  Master's  degree  in  1576,  and  then  left  Cam- 
bridge. He  gained  no  Fellowship,  and  there  is  nothing  to  show 
how  he  employed  himself.  His  classical  learning,  whether  acquired 
there  or  elsewhere,  was  copious,  but  curiously  inaccurate  ;  and  the 
only  specimen  remaining  of  his  Latin  composition  in  verse  is  con- 
temptible in  its  mediaeval  clumsiness.  We  know  nothing  of  his 
Cambridge  life  except  the  friendships  which  he  formed  there.  An 


SPENSER. 


19 


intimacy  began  at  Cambridge  of  the  closest  and  most  affectionate 
kind,  which  lasted  long  into  after-life,  between  him  and  two  men  of 
his  college,  one  older  in  standing  than  himself,  the  other  younger; 
Gabriel  Harve}',  first  a  fellow  of  Pembroke,  and  then  a  student  or 
teacher  of  civil  law  at  Trinity  Hall,  and  Edward  Kirke,  like  Spenser, 
a  sizar  at  Pembroke,  recently  identified  with  the  E.  K.  who  was  the 
editor  and  commentator  of  Spenser's  earliest  work,  the  anonymous 
Shepherd's  Cale^tdar.  Of  the  younger  friend  this  is  the  most  that 
is  known.  That  he  was  deeply  in  Spenser's  confidence  as  a  literary 
coadjutor,  and  possibly  in  other  ways,  is  shown  in  the  work  which 
he  did.  But  Gabriel  Harvey  was  a  man  who  had  influence  on 
Spenser's  ideas  and  purposes,  and  on  the  direction  of  his  efforts. 
He  was  a  classical  scholar  of  much  distinction  in  his  day,  well  read 
in  the  Italian  authors  then  so  fashionable,  and  regarded  as  a  high 
authority  on  questions  of  criticism  and  taste.  Except  to  students 
of  EHzabethan  literary  history,  he  has  become  an  utterly  obscure 
personage  ;  and  he  has  not  usually  been  spoken  of  with  much  re- 
spect. He  had  the  misfortune,  later  in  life,  to  plunge  violently  into 
the  scurrilous  quarrels  of  the  day,  and  as  he  was  matched  with  wit- 
tier and  more  popular  antagonists,  he  has  come  down  to  us  as  a 
foolish  pretender,  or  at  least  as  a  dull  and  stupid  scholar  who  knew 
little  of  the  real  value  of  the  books  he  was  always  ready  to  quote, 
like  the  pedant  of  the  comedies,  or  Shakespere's  schoolmaster 
Holofernes.  Further,  he  was  one  who,  with  his  classical  learning, 
had  little  belief  in  the  resources  of  his  mother-tongue,  and  he  was 
one  of  the  earliest  and  most  confident  supporters  of  a  plan  then 
fashionable,  for  reforming  English  verse,  by  casting  away  its  natu- 
ral habits  and  rhythms,  and  imposing  on  it  the  laws  of  the  classical 
metres.  In  this'he  was  not  singular.  The  professed  treatises  of 
this  time  on  poetry,  of  which  there  were  several,  assume  the  same 
theory,  as  the  mode  of  ''reforming"  and  duly  elevating  English 
verse.  In  was  eagerly  accepted  by  Philip  Sidney  and  his  Areop- 
agus of  wits  at  court,  who  busied  themselves  in  devising  rules  of 
their  own — improvements  as  they  thought  on  those  of  the  universi- 
ty men— for  English  hexameters  and  sapphics,  or,  as  they  called  it, 
artificial  versifying.  They  regarded  the  comparative  value  of  the 
native  English  rhythms  and  the  classical  metres,  much  as  our  an- 
cestors of  "Addison's  day  regarded  the  comparison  between  Gothic 
and  Palladian  architecture.  One,  even  if  it  sometimes  had  a  certain 
romantic  interest,  was  rude  and  coarse  ;  the  other  was  the  perfec- 
tion of  polite  art  and  good  taste.  Certainly  in  what  remains  of  Ga- 
briel Harvey's  writing,  there  is  much  that  seems  to  us  vain  and 
ridiculous  enough  ;  and  it  has  been  naturally  surmised  that  he  must 
have  been  a  dangerous  friend  and  counsellor  to  Spenser.  But  prob- 
ably we  are  hard  upon  him.  His  writings,  after  all,  are  not  much 
more  affected  and  absurd  in  their  outward  fashion  than  most  of  the 
literary  compositions  of  the  time  ;  his  verse  are  no  worse  than  those 
of  most  of  his  neighbours  ;  he  was  not  above,  but  he  was  not  below, 
the  false  taste  and  clumsiness  of  his  age  ;  and  the  rage  for  "  artificial 
versifying"  was  for  the  moment  in  the  air.    And  it  must  be  said, 


20 


SPENSER. 


that  though  his  enthusiasm  for  English  hexameters  is  of  a  piece 
with  the  puritan  use  of  Scripture  texts  in  divinity  and  morals,  yet 
there  is  no  want  of  hard-headed  shrewdness  in  his  remarks ;  indeed, 
in  his  rules  for  the  adaptation  of  English  words  and  accents  to 
classical  metres,  he  shows  clearness  and  good  sense  in  apprehend- 
ing the  conditions  of  the  problem,  while  Sidney  and  Spenser  still 
appear  confused  and  uncertain.  But  in  spite  of  his  pedantry,  and 
though  he  had  not,  as  we  shall  see,  the  eye  to  discern  at  first  the 
genius  of  the  Faerie  Queene^  he  has  to  us  the  interest  of  having 
been  Spenser's  first,  and  as  far  as  we  can  see,  to  the  last,  dearest 
friend.  By  both  of  his  younger  fellow-students  at  Cambridge  he 
was  looked  up  to  with  the  deepest  reverence  and  the  most  confiding 
affection.  Their  language  is  extravagant,  but  there  is  no  reason 
to  think  that  it  was  not  genuine.  E.  Kirke,  the  editor  of  Spenser's 
first  venture,  the  Shephe7'crs  Calendar^  commends  the  *'new  poet " 
to  his  patronage,  and  to  the  protection  of  his  "mighty  rhetoric,*' 
and  exhorts  Harvey  himself  to  seize  the  poetical  "  garland  which  to 
him  alone  is  due."  Spenser  speaks  in  the  same  terms  :  verunia- 
men  te  seqiwr  sohwi  J  nu7iqua7n  vero  assequar^  Portions  of  the 
early  correspondence  between  Harvey  and  Spenser  have  been  pre- 
served to  us,  possibly  by  Gabriel  Harvey's  self-satisfaction  in  regard 
to  his  own  compositions.  But  with  the  pedagogue's  jocoseness, 
and  a  playfulness  which  is  like  that  of  an  elephant,  it  shows  on  both 
sides  easy  frankness,  sincerity,  and  warmth,  and  not  a  little  of  the 
early  character  of  the  younger  man.  In  Spenser's  earliest  poetry, 
his  pastorals,  Harvey  appears  among  the  imaginary  rustics,  as  the 
poet's  special  and  most  famiUar  friend,"  under  the  name  of  Hob- 
binol — 

Good  Hobbinol,  that  was  so  true." 

To  him  Spenser  addresses  his  confidences,  under  the  name  of 
Colin  Clout,  a  name  borrowed  from  Skelton,  a  satirical  poet  of 
Henry  VIII. 's  time,  which  Spenser  kept  throughout  his  poetical 
career.  Harvey  reappears  in  one  of  Spenser's  latest  writings,  a 
return  to  the  early  pastoral,  Colin  Clout's  come  home  a^ain,  a 
picture  drawn  in  distant  Ireland,  of  the  brilliant  but  disappointing 
court  of  Ehzabeth.  And  from  Ireland,  in  1586,  was  addressed  to 
Karvey  by^  his  "  devoted  friend  during  life,"  the  following  fine 
sonnet,  which,  whatever  may  have  been  the  merit  of  Harvey's 
criticisms,  and  his  literary  quarrels  with  Greene  and  Nash,  shows 
at  least  Spenser's  unabated  honour  for  him. 

**  To  THE  Right  Worshipful,  my  singular  good  Friend  M.  Ga* 
BRiEL  Harvey,  Doctor  of  the  Laws. 

Harvey,  the  happy  above  happiest  men 

I  read  ;  that,  sitting  like  a  looker  on 

Of  this  world's  stage,  dost  note  with  critic 

The  sharp  dislikes  of  each  condition ; 

And,  as  one  careless  of  suspicion, 

Ne  fawnest  for  the  favour  of  the  great ; 


SPENSER. 


21 


Ne  fearest  foolish  reprehension 
Of  faulty  men,  which  danger  to  thee  threat ; 
But  freely  dost,  of  what  thee  list,  entreat, 
Like  a  great  lord  of  peerless  liberty; 
Lifting  the  good  up  to  high  honour's  seat, 
And  the  evil  damning  ever  more  to  die  ; 
For  life  and  death  is  in  thy  doomful  writing  ; 
So  thy  renown  lives  ever  by  enditing. 
"  Dublin,  this  xviii.  of  July,  1586.    Your  devoted  friend,  during  life, 

"Edmund  Spenser." 

Between  Cambridge  and  Spenser's  appearance  in  London,  there 
is  a  short  but  obscure  interval.  What  is  certain  is,  that  he  spent 
part  of  it  in  the  North  of  England  ;  that  he  was  busy  with  various 
poetical  works,  one  of  which  v/as  soon  to  make  him  known  as  a 
new  star  in  the  poetical  heaven  ;  and  lastly,  that  in  the  effect  on 
him  of  a  deep  but  unrequited  passion,  he  then  received  what  seems 
to  have  been  a  strong  and  determining  influence  on  his  character 
and  life.  It  seems  likely  that  his  sojourn  in  the  north,  which 
perhaps  first  introduced  the  London-bred  scholar,  the  "  Southern 
Shepherd's  Boy,"  to  the  novel  and  rougher  country  life  of  distant 
Lancashire,  also  gave  form  and  local  character  to  his  first  con- 
siderable work.  But  we  do  not  know  for  certain  where  his  abode 
was  in  the  north  ;  of  his  literary  activity,  which  must  have  been 
considerable,  we  only  partially  know  the  fruit ;  and  of  the  lady 
whom  he  made  so  famous,  that  her  name  became  a  consecrated 
word  in  the  poetry  of  the  time,  of  Rosalind,  the  "Widow's  Daughter 
of  the  Glen,"  whose  refusal  of  his  suit,  and  preference  for  another, 
he  lamented  so  bitterly,  yet  would  allow  no  one  else  to  blame,  we 
know  absolutely  nothing.  She  would  not  be  his  wife :  but  ap- 
parently, he  never  ceased  to  love  her  through  all  the  chances  and 
temptations,  and  possibly  errors  of  his  life,  even  apparently  in  the 
midst  of  his  passionate  admiration  of  the  lady  whom,  long  after- 
wards, he  did  marry.  To  her  kindred  and  condition,  various  clues 
have  been  suggested,  only  to  provoke  and  disappoint  us.  What- 
ever her  condition,  she  was  able  to  measure  Spenser's  powers  : 
Gabriel  Harvey  has  preserved  one  of  her  compliments — "  Gentle 
Mistress  Rosalind  once  reported  him  to  have  all  the  intellic;ences 
at  commandment ;  and  at  another,  christened  him  her  Signior 
Pegaso^  But  the  unknown  Rosalind  had  given  an  impulse  to 
the  young  poet's  powers,  and  a  colour  to  his  thoughts,  and  had 
enrolled  Spenser  in  that  band  and  order  of  poets — with  one  ex- 
ception, not  the  greatest  order — to  whom  the  wonderful  passion  of 
love,  in  its  heights  and  its  depths,  is  the  element  on  which  their 
imagination  works,  and  out  of  which  it  moulds  its  most  beautiful 
and  characteristic  creations. 

But  in  October,  1579,  he  emerges  from  obscurity.  If  we  may 
trust  the  correspondence  between  Gabriel  Harvey  and  Spenser, 
which  was  published  at  the  time,  Spenser  was  then  in  London.* 

*  Published  in  June,  ii;8o.  Reprinted  incompletely  in  Haslewood,  Aficient  Critical 
Essays  (1815),  ii.  255.  Extracts  given  in  editions  of  Spenser  by  Hughes,  Todd,  and 
Morris.    The  letters  are  of  April,  1579,  and  October  1580. 


22 


SPENSER. 


It  was  the  time  of  the  crisis  of  the  Alengon  courtships  while  the 
queen  was  playing  fast  and  loose  with  her  Valois  lover,  whom  she 
playfully  called  her  frog ;  when  all  about  her,  Burghley,  Leicester, 
Sidney,  and  Walsingham,  were  dismayed,  both  at  the  plan  itself, 
and  at  her  vacillations  ;  and  just  when  the  Puritan  pamphleteer,  who 
who  had  given  expression  to  the  popular  disgust  at  a  French 
marriage,  especially  at  a  connexion  with  the  family  which  had  on 
its  hands  the  blood  of  St.  Bartholomew,  was  sentenced  to  lose  his 
right  hand  as  a  seditious  libeller.  Spenser  had  become  acquainted 
with  Philip  Sidney,  and  Sidney's  literary  and  courtly  friends.  He 
had  been  received  into  the  household  of  Sidney's  uncle.  Lord 
Leicester,  and  dates  one  of  his  letters  from  Leicester  House. 
Among  his  employments  he  had  written  "  Stemmata  Dttdleianay* 
He  is  doubting  whether  or  not  to  publish,  *•  to  utter,"  some  of  his 
poetical  compositions  :  he  is  doubting,  and  asks  Harvey's  advice, 
whether  or  not  to  dedicate  them  to  His  Excellent  Lordship,  lest 
by  our  much  cloying  their  noble  ears  he  should  gather  contempt  of 
myself,  or  else  seem  rather  for  gain  and  commodity  to  do  it,  and 
some  sweetness  that  I  have  already  tasted.''  Yet,  he  thinks,  that 
when  occasion  is  so  fairly  offered  of  estimation  and  preferment,  it 
may  be  well  to  use  it :  ^'  w^hile  the  iron  is  hot,  it  is  good  striking; 
and  minds  of  nobles  vary,  as  their  estates."  And  he  was  on  the 
eve  of  starting  across  the  sea  to  be  employed  in  Leicester's  service, 
on  some  permanent  mission  in  France,  perhaps  in  connexion  with 
the  Alengon  intrigues.  He  was  thus  launched  into  what  was  looked 
upon  as  the  road  to  preferment  ;  in  his  case,  as  it  turned  out,  a 
very  subordinate  form  of  public  employment,  which  was  to  con- 
tinue almost  for  his  lifetime.  Sidney  had  recognised  his  unusual 
power,  if  not  yet  his  genius.  He  brought  him  forward ;  perhaps  he 
accepted  him  as  a  friend.  Tradition  makes  him  Sidney's  com 
panion  at  Penshurst ;  in  his  early  poems,  Kent  is  the  county  with 
which  he  seems  most  familiar.  But  Sidney  certainly  made  him 
known  to  the  queen  ;  he  probably  recommended  him  as  a  promising 
servant  to  Leicester  :  and  he  impressed  his  own  noble  and  beauti- 
ful character  deeply  on  Spenser's  mind.  Spenser  saw  and  learned 
in  him  what  was  then  the  highest  type  of  the  finished  gentleman. 
He  led  Spenser  astray.  Sidney  was  not  without  his  full  share  of 
that  affectation,  which  was  then  thought  refinement.  Like  Gabriel 
Harvey,  he  induced  Spenser  to  waste  his  time  on  the  artificial 
versifying  which  was  in  vogue.  But  such  faults  and  mistakes  of 
fashion,  and  in  one  shape  or  another  they  are  inevitable  in  all  ages, 
were  as  nothing,  compared  to  the  influence  on  a  highly  receptive 
nature,  of  a  character  so  elevated  and  pure,  so  genial,  so  brave  and 
true.  It  was  not  in  vain  that  Spenser  was  thus  brought  so  near  to 
his  "  Astrophel." 

These  letters  tell  us  all  that  we  know  of  Spenser's  life  at  this 
time.  During  these  anxious  eighteen  months,  and  connected  with 
persons  like  Sidney  and  Leicester,  Spenser  only  writes  to  Harvey 
on  literary  subjects.  He  is  discreet,  and  will  not  indulge  Harvey's 
"  desire  to  hear  of  my  late  being  with  her  Majesty."    According  to 


SPENSER, 


23 


a  literary  fashion  of  the  time,  he  writes  and  is  addressed  as  M.  hn- 
merito^  and  the  great  business  which  occupies  him  and  fills  the 
letters  is  the  scheme  devised  in  ^xAwo.^^^  Arcopafnis  iox  the  "gen- 
eral surceasing  and  silence  of  bald  Rymcrs,  and  also  of  the  very 
best  of  them  too ;  and  for  prescribing  certain  laws  and  rules  of 
quantities  of  English  syllables  for  English  verse."  Spender  is 
more  in  love  with  his  English  versifying  than  with  ryming  " — 
which,'*  he  says  to  Harvey,  "  I  should  have  done  long  since,  if  I 
would  then  have  followed  your  counsel."  Harvey,  of  course,  is  de- 
lighted ;  he  thanks  the  good  angel  which  puts  it  into  the  heads  of 
Sidney  and  Edward  Dyer,  "the  two  very  diamonds  of  her  Majesty's 
court,"  "  our  very  Castor  and  Pollux,"  to  help  forward  our  new 
famous  enterprise  for  the  exchanging  of  barbarous  rymes  for 
artificial  verses  ;  "  and  the  whole  subject  is  discussed  at  great  length 
between  the  two  friends  ;  "  Mr.  Drant's"  rules  are  compared  with 
those  of  "  Mr,  Sidney,"  revised  by  "  Mr.  Immerito ;  "  and  examples, 
highly  illustrative  of  the  character  of  the  "  famous  enterprise,"  are 
copiously  given.  In  one  of  Harvey's  letters  we  have  a  curious 
account  of  changes  of  fashion  in  studies  and  ideas  at  Cambridge. 
They  seem  to  have  changed  since  Spenser's  tim.e. 

*'  I  beseech  you  all  this  while,  what  news  at  Cambridge  ?  Tully  and 
Demosthenes  nothing  so  much  studied  as  they  were  wont  :  Lizy  and  Salhisl 
perhaps  more,  rather  than  less  :  Lucian  never  so  much  :  Aristotle  much 
named  but  little  read  :  Xenophon  and  Plato  reckoned  amongst  discoursers, 
and  conceited  superficial  fellows  ;  much  verbal  and  sophistical  jangling  ; 
little  subtle  and  effectual  disputing.  Machiavel  a  great  man  :  Castillo  of 
no  small  repute  :  Petrarch  and  Boccace  in  every  man's  mouth :  Galateo 
and  Guazzo  never  so  happy  :  but  some  acquainted  with  Uiiico  Aretino  : 
the  French  and  Italiafi  highly  regarded  :  the  Latin  and  Greek  but  lightly. 
The  Queen  Mother  at  the  beginning  or  end  of  every  conference  :  all  inquis- 
itive after  news  :  new  books ^  new  fashions,  new  laws,  new  officers,  and 
some  after  new  elements,  some  after  new  heavens  and  hells  too.  Turkish 
affairs  familiarly  known  :  castles  built  in  the  air  :  much  ado,  and  little 
help  :  in  no  age  so  little  so  much  made  of  ;  every  one  highly  in  his  own 
favour.  Something  made  of  nothing,  in  spight  of  Nature  :  numbers  made 
of  cyphers,  in  spight  of  Art.  Oxen  and  asses,  notwithstanding  the  ab- 
surdity it  seemed  to  PlaicticSy  drawing  in  the  same  yoke  :  the  Gospel  taught, 
not  learnt ;  Charity  cold  ;  nothing  good  but  by  imputation  ;  the  Cere- 
monial Law  in  word  abrogated,  the  Judicial  in  effect  disannull'd,  the 
Moral  abandon'd  ;  the  Light,  the  Light  in  every  man's  lips,  but  mark 
their  eyes,  and  you  will  say  they  are  rather  like  owls  than  eagles.  As  of 
old  books,  so  of  ancient  virtue,  honesty,  fidelity,  equity,  new  abridgments  ; 
every  day  spawns  new  opinions:  heresy  in  divinity,  in  philosophy,  inhuman- 
ity, in  manners,  grounded  upon  hearsay;  doctors  contemn'd';  the  dr<'il 
not  so  hated  as  the  pope  ;  many  invectives,  but  no  amendment.  No  more 
ado  about  caps  and  surplices  ;'Mr.  Cartwright  quite  forgotten. 

David,  Ulysses,  and  Solofi  feignM  themselves  fools  and  madmen  ;  our  fool^ 
and  madmen  feign  themselves  Davids,  Ulysses's  and  Solons.  It  is  pitv 
fair  weather  should  do  any  hurt  ;  but  I  know  what  peace  and  quietness 
hath  done  with  some  melancholy  pickstraws." 


24 


SPENSER, 


The  letters  preserve  a  good  many  touches  of  character  wliich 
are  interesting.  This,  for  instance,  which  shows  Spenser's  feeling 
about  Sidney.  New  books,"  writes  Spenser,  "  I  hear  of  none, 
but  only  of  one,  that  writing  a  certain  book  called  77ic  School  of 
Abuse  [Stephen  Gosson's  Invective  agamst  poets,  pipers,  players^ 
&^c.\  and  dedicating  to  M.  Sidney,  was  for  his  labour  scorned  :  if 
at  least  it  be  i7i  the  goodness  of  that  tiature  to  scorn?^  As  regards 
Spenser  himself,  it  is  clear  from  the  letters  that  Harvey  was  not 
without  uneasiness  lest  his  friend,  from  his  gay  and  pleasure-loving 
nature,  and  the  temptations  round  him,  should  be  carried  away  into 
the  vices  of  an  age  which,  though  very  brilliant  and  high-tempered, 
was  also  a  very  dissolute  one.  He  couches  his  counsels  mainly  in 
Latin  ;  but  they  point  to  real  danger  ;  and  he  adds  in  English — 
Credit  me,  I  will  never  lin  [=  cease]  baiting  at  you,  till  I  have 
rid  you  quite  of  this  yonkerly  and  womanly  humour."  But  in  the 
second  pair  of  letters  of  April,  1580,  a  lady  appears.  Whether 
Spenser  was  her  husband  or  her  lover,  we  know  not ;  but  she  is  his 
"  sweetheart."  The  two  friends  write  of  her  in  Latin.  Spenser 
sends  in  Latin  the  saucy  messages  of  his  sweetheart,  meum  corcu- 
lum,"  to  Harvey;  Harvey,  with  academic  gallantry,  sends  her  in 
Latin  as  many  thanks  for  her  charming  letter  as  she  has  hairs,  half 
golden,  half  silver,  half  jewelled,  in  her  little  head ;  " — she  is  a 
second  little  Rosalind — altera  Rosalindula,"  whom  he  salutes  as 
"  Domina  Immerito,  mea  bellissima  Colina  Clouta."  But  whether 
wife  or  mistress,  we  hear  of  her  no  more.  Further,  the  letters 
contain  notices  of  various  early  works  of  Spenser.  The  new  " 
Shepherd's  Calendar,  of  Vv'hich  more  will  be  said,  had  just  been 
published.  And  in  this  correspondence  of  April,  1580,  we  have  the 
first  mention  of  the  Faerie  Queene.  The  compositions  here  miCn- 
tioned  have  been  either  lost,  or  worked  into  his  later  poetry  ;  his 
Dreams,  Epithalamion  Thamesis,  apparently  in  the  reformed 
verse,"  his  Dying  Pelican,  his  Slumber,  his  Stemtnata  Dudleiana, 
his  Comedies.  They  show  at  least  the  activity  and  eagerness  of 
the  writer  in  his  absorbing  pursuit.  But  he  was  still  in  bondage  to 
the  belief  that  English  poetry  ought  to  try  to  put  on  a  classical 
dress.  It  is  strange  that  the  man  who  had  written  some  of  the 
poetry  in  the  Shepherd's  Caleftdar  should  have  found  either  satis- 
faction or  promise  in  the  following  attempt  at  Trimeter  Iambics. 

And  nowe  requite  I  you  with  the  like,  not  with  the  verve  baste,  but 
with  the  verye  shortest,  namely,  with  a  few  lambickes  :  I  dare  warrant 
they  be  precisely  perfect  for  the  feete  (as  you  can  easily  judge),  and  varie 
not  one  inch  from  the  Rule.  I  will  imparte  yours  to  Maister  Sidney  and 
Maister  Dyer  at  my  nexte  going  to  the  Courte.  I  praye  you,  keepe  mine 
close  to  yourself,  or  your  verie  entire  friends,  Maister  Prestcn,  Maistet 
Still,  and  the  reste. 

*'  lambicum  Trimetruin 

**  Unhappie  Yerse,  the  witnesse  of  my  unhappie  state, 
Make  thy  selfe  fluttring  wings  of  thy  fast  flying 
Thought,  and  fly  forth  unto  rny  Love  wheresoever  she  l>r. 


SP£ArSER. 


25 


"  Whether  lying  reastlcsse  in  heavy  bedde,  or  else 

Sitting  so  cheerlesse  at  the  checrfull  boorde,  or  else 
Playing  alone  carclesse  on  hir  heavenlie  Virginals. 

If  in  Bed,  tell  hir,  that  my  eyes  can  take  no  reste  : 

If  at  Boorde,  tell  hir  that  my  mouth  can  eate  no  meate  i 
If  at  hir  Virginals,  tell  hir  I  can  heare  no  mirth. 

"  Asked  why  ?  say  :  Waking  Love  suffereth  no  sleepe  : 

Say,  that  raging  Love  dothe  appall  the  weake  stomacke  : 
Say,  that  lamenting  Love  marreth  the  Musical). 

Tell  hir,  that  hir  pleasures  were  wonte  to  lull  me  asleepe  : 
Tell  hir,  that  hir  beautie  was  w^onte  to  feede  mine  eyes  : 
Tell  hir,  that  hir  sweete  Tongue  was  wonte  to  make  me  mirth 

"Nowe  doe  I  nightly  waste,  wanting  my  kindely  reste 
Nowe  doe  I  dayjy  starve,  wanting  my  lively  foode  : 
Nowe  doe  I  alwayes  dye,  wanting  thy  timely  mirtk. 

And  if  I  waste,  who  will  bewaile  my  heavy  chaunce  } 
And  if  I  starve,  who  will  record  my  cursed  end  ? 
And  if  I  dye,  who  will  saye  :  this  tuas  Immerito  / 


26 


SPENSEK. 


CHAPTER  II. 

THE  NEW  POET— THE  SHEPHERD  S  CALENDAR. 
[I579-] 

It  is  clear  that  when  Spenser  appeared  in  London,  he  had 
found  out  his  powers  and  vocation  as  a  poet.  He  came  from  Cam* 
bridge,  fully  conscious  of  the  powerful  attraction  of  the  imaginative 
faculties,  conscious  of  an  extraordinary  command  over  the  resour- 
ces of  language,  and  with  a  singular  gift  of  sensitiveness  to  the 
grace  and  majesty  and  suggestiveness  of  sound  and  rhythm,  such 
as  makes  a  musician.  And  whether  he  knew  it  or  not,  his  mind 
was  in  reality  made  up,  as  to  what  his  English  poetry  was  to  be. 
In  spite  of  opinions  and  fashions  round  him,  in  spite  of  university 
pedantry  and  the  affectations  of  the  court,  in  spite  of  Harvey's 
classical  enthusiasm  and  Sidney's  Areopagus,  and  in  spite  of  half- 
fancying  himself  converted  to  their  views,  his  own  powers  and  im- 
pulses showed  him  the  truth,  and  made  him  understand  better  than 
his  theories  what  a  poet  could  and  ought  to  do  with  English  speech 
in  its  free  play  and  genuine  melodies.  When  we  first  come  upon 
him,  we  find  that  at  the  age  of  twenty-seven,  he  had  not  only 
realised  an  idea  of  English  poetry  far  in  advance  of  anything  which 
his  age  had  yet  conceived  or  seen  ;  but  that,  besides  what  he  had 
executed  or  planned,  he  had  already  in  his  mind  the  outlines  of  the 
Faerie  Qiteene^  and,  in  some  form  or  other,  though  perhaps  not  yet 
as  we  have  it,  had  written  some  portion  of  it. 

In  attempting  to  revive  for  his  own  age  Chaucer's  suspended 
art,  Spenser  had  the  tendencies  of  the  time  with  him.  The  age 
was  looking  out  for  some  one  to  do  for  England  what  had  been 
grandly  done  for  Italy.  The  time,  in  truth,  was  full  of  poetry. 
The  nation  was  just  in  that  condition  which  is  most  favourable  to 
an  outburst  of  poetical  life  or  art.  It  was  highly  excited  ;  but  it 
was  also  in  a  state  of  comparative  peace  and  freedom  from  external 
disturbance.  "An  over-faint  quietness,"  writes  Sidney  in  1581, 
lamenting  that  there  were  so  few  good  poets,  "should  seem  to 
strew  the  house  for  poets."  After  the  first  ten  years  of  Elizabeth's 
reign,  and  the  establishment  of  her  authority,  the  country  had 
begun  to  breathe  freely,  and  fall  into  natural  and  regular  ways. 
During  the  first  half  of  the  century,  it  had  had  before  it  the  most 


SPENSER. 


27 


astonishing  changes  which  the  world  had  seen  for  centuries. 
These  changes  seemed  definitely  to  have  run  their  course  ;  with  the 
convulsions  which  accompanied  them,  their  uprootings  and  terrors, 
they  were  gone  ;  and  the  world  had  become  accustomed  to  their 
results.  The  nation  still  had  before  it  great  events,  great  issues, 
great  perils,  great  and  indefinite  prospects  of  adventure  and  achieve- 
ment. The  old  quarrels  and  animosities  of  Europe  had  altered  in 
character :  from  being  wars  between  princes,  and  disputes  of  per- 
sonal ambition,  they  had  attracted  into  them  all  that  interests  and 
divides  mankind,  from  high  to  low.  Their  animating  principle  was 
a  high  and  a  sacred  cause  :  they  had  become  wars  of  liberty,  and 
wars  of  religion.  The  world  had  settled  down  to  the  fixed  antip- 
athies and  steady  rivalries  of  centuries  to  come.  But  the  mere 
shock  of  transition  was  over.  Yet  the  remembrance  of  the  great 
break-up  was  still  fresh.  For  fifty  years  the  English  people  had 
had  before  its  eyes  the  great  vicissitudes  which  make  tragedy. 
They  had  seen  the  most  unforeseen  and  most  unexpected  revolu- 
tions in  what  had  for  ages  been  held  certain  and  immovable ;  the 
overthrow  of  the  strongest  institutions,  and  most  venerable  au- 
thorities ;  the  violent  shifting  of  feelings  from  faith  to  passionate 
rejection,  from  reverence  to  scorn  and  a  hate  which  could  not  be 
satisfied.  They  had  seen  the  strangest  turns  of  fortune,  the  most 
wonderful  elevations  to  power,  the  most  terrible  visitations  of  dis- 
grace. They  had  seen  the  mightiest  ruined,  the  brightest  and 
most  admired  brought  down  to  shame  and  death,  men  struck  down 
with  all  the  forms  of  law,  whom  the  age  honoured  as  its  noblest 
ornaments.  They  had  seen  the  flames  of  martyr  or  heretic,  heads 
which  had  worn  a  crown  laid  one  after  another  on  the  block,  con- 
troversies, not  merely  between  rivals  for  power,  but  between  the 
deepest  principles  and  the  most  rooted  creeds,  settled  on  the  scaf- 
fold. Such  a  time  of  surprise—of  hope  and  anxiety,  of  horror  and 
anguish  to-day,  of  relief  and  exultation  to-morrow — had  hardly 
been  to  England  as  the  first  half  of  the  sixteenth  century.  All 
that  could  stir  men's  souls,  all  that  could  inflame  their  hearts,  or 
that  could  wring  them,  had  happened. 

And  yet,  compared  with  previous  centuries,  and  with  what  was 
going  on  abroad,  the  time  now  was  a  time  of  peace,  and  men 
lived  securely.  Wealth  was  increasing.  The  Wars  of  the  Roses 
had  left  the  crown  powerful  to  enforce  order,  and  protect  industry 
and  trade.  The  nation  was  beginning  to  grow  rich.  When  the 
day's  work  was  done,  men's  leisure  was  not  disturbed  by  the  events 
of  neighbouring  war.  They  had  time  to  open  their  imaginations  to 
the  great  spectacle  which  had  been  unrolled  before  them,  to  reflect 
upon  it,  to  put  into  shape  their  thoughts  about  it.  The  intellectual 
movement  of  the  time  had  reached  England,  and  its  strong  impulse 
to  mental  efforts  in  new  and  untried  directions  was  acting  powerfully 
upon  Englishmen.  But  though  there  was  order  and  present  peace 
at  home,  there  was  much  to  keep  men's  minds  on  the  stretch. 
There  was  quite  enough  danger  and  uncertainty  to  wind  up  their 
feelings  to  a  high  pitch.    But  danger  was  not  so  pressing  as  to 


28 


SPENSER, 


prevent  them  from  giving  full  place  to  the  impressions  of  the 
strange  and  eventful  scene  round  them,  with  its  grandeur,  its  sad' 
ness,  its  promises.  In  such  a  state  of  things  there  is  everything 
to  tempt  poetry.  There  are  its  materials  and  its  stimulus,  and 
there  is  the  leisure  to  use  its  materials. 

But  the  poet  had  not  yet  been  found  ;  and  everything  connected 
with  poetry  was  in  the  disorder  of  ignorance  and  uncertainty.  Be- 
tween the  counsels  of  a  pedantic  scholarship,  and  the  rude  and 
hesitating,  but  true  instincts  of  the  natural  English  ear,  every  one 
was  at  sea.  Yet  it  seemed  as  if  every  one  was  trying  his  hand  at 
verse.  Popular  writing  took  that  shape.  The  curious  and  unique 
record  of  literature  preserved  in  the  registers  of  the  Stationers' 
Company,  shows  that  the  greater  proportion  of  what  was  published, 
or  at  least  entered  for  publication,  was  in  the  shape  of  ballads. 
The  ballad  vied  with  the  sermon  in  doing  what  the  modern  news- 
paper does,  in  satisfying  the  public  craving  for  information,  amuse- 
ment, or  guidance.  It  related  the  last  great  novelty,  the  last  great 
battle  or  crime,  a  storm  or  monstrous  birlh.  It  told  some  pathetic 
or  burlesque  story,  or  it  moralised  on  the  humours  or  follies  of 
classes  and  professions,  of  young  and  old,  of  men  and  of  women. 
It  sang  the  lover's  hopes  or  sorrows,  or  the  adventures  of  some 
hero  of  history  or  romance.  It  might  be  a  fable,  a  satire,  a  libel, 
a  squib,  a  sacred  song  or  paraphrase,  a  homily.  But  a])out  all  that 
it  treated  it  sought  to  throw  more  or  less  the  colour  of  imagination. 
It  appealed  to  the  reader's  feelings,  or  sympathy,  or  passion.  It 
attempted  to  raise  its  subject  above  the  level  of  mere  matter  of 
fact.  It  sought  for  choice  and  expressive  words;  it  called  in  the 
help  of  m.easure  and  rhythm.  It  aimed  at  a  rude  form  of  art.  Pres- 
ently the  critical  faculty  came  into  play.  Scholars,  acquainted  with 
classical  models  and  classical  rules,  began  to  exercise  their  judg- 
ment on  their  own  poetry,  to  construct  theories,  to  review  the  per- 
formances before  them,  to  suggest  plans  for  the  improvement  of 
the  poetic  art.  Their  essays  are  curious,  as  the  beginnings  of  that 
great  critical  literature,  which  in  England,  in  spite  of  much  infeli- 
city, has  only  been  second  to  the  poetry  which  it  judged.  But  in 
themselves  they  are  crude, meagre,  and  helpless  ;  interesting  mainly 
as  showing  how  much  craving  there  was  for  poetry,  and  how  little 
good  poetry  to  satisfy  it,  and  what  inconceivable  doggerel  could  be 
recommended  by  reasonable  men,  as  fit  to  be  admired  and  imitated. 
There  is  fire  and  eloquence  in  Philip  Sidney's  Apologie  for  Poetrie 
(1581);  but  his  ideas  about  poetry  were  floating,  loose,  and  ill- 
defined,  and  he  had  not  much  to  point  to  as  of  first-rate  excellence 
in  recent  writers.  Webbe's  Discottrse  of  E7iglish  Poefrte  {i^^6\ 
and  the  more  elaborate  work  ascribed  to  George  Puttenham  (1589), 
works  of  tame  and  artificial  learning  without  Sidney's  fire,  reveal 
equally  the  poverty,  as  a  whole,  of  what  had  been  as  yet  produced 
in  England  as  poetry,  in  spite  of  the  wide-spread  passion  for  poe- 
try, specimens  which  they  quote  and  praise  are  mostly  gro- 
tesque to  tlie  last  degree.  Webbe  improves  some  gracefully  flowing 
lines  of  Spenser's  into  the  most  portentous  Sapphics  ;  and  Putten- 


SPENSER. 


29 


ham  squeezes  compositions  into  the  shapes  of  triangles,  eggs,  and 
pilasters.  Gabriel  Harvey  is  accused  by  his  tormentor,  Nash,  of 
doing  the  same,  "  of  having  writ  verse  in  all  kinds,  as  in  form  of  a 
pair  of  gloves,  a  dozen  of  points,  a  pair  of  spectacles,  a  two-hand 
sword,  a  poynado,  a  colossus,  a  pyramid,  a  painter's  easel,  a  market 
cross,  a  trumpet,  an  anchor,  a  pair  of  pot-hooks."  Puttenham's 
Art  of  Poetry,  with  its  books,  one  on  Proportion,  the  other  on  Or- 
nament, might  be  compared  to  an  Art  of  War,  of  which  one  book 
treated  of  barrack  drill,  and  the  other  of  busbies,  sabretasches,  and 
different  forms  of  epaulettes  and  feathers.  These  writers  do  not 
want  good  sense  or  the  power  to  make  a  good  remark.  But  the 
stuff  and  material  for  good  criticism,  the  strong  and  deep  poetry, 
which  make  such  criticisms  as  theirs  seem  so  absurd,  had  not 
yet  appeared. 

A  change  was  at  hand  ;  and  the  suddenness  of  it  is  one  of  the 
most  astonishing  things  in  literary  history.  The  ten  years  from 
1580  to  1590  present  a  set  of  critical  essays,  giving  a  picture  of 
English  poetry  of  which,  though  there  are  gleams  of  a  better  hope, 
and  praise  is  specially  bestowed  on  a  ^' new  poet,"  the  general 
character  is  feebleness,  fantastic  absurdity,  affectation,  and  bad 
taste.  Force,  and  passion,  and  simple  truth,  and  powerful  thoughts 
of  the  v/orld  and  man,  are  rare ;  and  poetical  reformers  appear 
maundering  about  miserable  attem.pts  at  English  hexameters  and 
Sapphics.  What  was  to  be  looked  for  from  all  that  1  Who  could 
suppose  what  was  preparing  under  it  all  ?  But  the  dawn  was  come. 
The  next  ten  years,  from  1590  to  1600,  not  only  saw  the  Faerie 
Qiieene,  but  they  were  the  years  of  the  birth  of  the  English  Drama. 
Compare  the  idea  which  we  get  of  English  poetry  from  Philip  Sid- 
ney's Defense  in  1581,  and  Puttenham's  treatise  in  1589,  I  do  not 
say  with  Shakespere,  but  with  Lamb's  selections  from  the  Dramatic 
Poets,  many  of  them  unknown  names  to  the  majority  of  modern 
readers ;  and  we  see  at  once  what  a  bound  English  poetry  has  made  ; 
we  see  that  a  new  spring-time  of  power  and  purpose  in  poetical 
thought  has  opened  ;  new  and  original  forms  have  sprung  to  life  of 
poetical  grandeur,  seriousness,  and  magnificence.  From  the  poor 
and  rude  play-houses,  with  their  troops  of  actors,most  of  them  prof- 
ligate and  disreputable,  their  coarse  excitements,  their  buffoonery, 
license  and  taste  for  the  monstrous  and  horrible — denounced  not 
without  reason  as  corrupters  of  pubHc  morals,  preached  against  at 
Paul's  Cross,  expelled  the  city  by  the  Corporation,  classed  by  the 
with  law  rogues,  vagabonds,  and  sturdy  beggars,  and  patronised  by 
the  great  and  unscrupulous  nobles  in  defiance  of  it — there  burst 
forth  suddenly  a  new  poetry,  which  with  its  reality,  depth,  sweet- 
ness and  nobleness  took  the  world  captive.  The  poetical  ideas 
and  aspirations  of  the  Englishmen  of  the  time  had  found  at  last 
adequate  interpreters,  and  their  own  national  and  unrivalled  ex- 
pression. 

And  in  this  great  movement  Spenser  was  the  harbinger  and 
announcing  sign.  But  he  was  only  the  harbinger.  What  he  did 
was  to  reveal  to  English  ears  as  it  never  had  been  revealed  before, 


30 


SPENSER. 


at  least,  since  the  days  of  Chaucer,  the  sweet  music,  the  refined 
grace,  the  inexhaustible  versatility  of  the  English  tongue.  But  his 
own  efforts  were  in  a  different  direction  from  that  profound  and 
insatiable  seeking  after  the  real,  in  thought  and  character,  in  rep- 
resentation and  expression,  which  made  Shakespere  so  great,  and 
his  brethren  great  in  proportion  as  they  approached  him.  Spen- 
ser's genius  continued  to  the  end  under  the  influences  which  were 
so  powerful  when  it  first  unfolded  itself.  To  the  last  it  allied 
itself,  in  form  at  least,  with  the  artificial.  To  the  last  it  moved  in 
a  world  which  was  not  real,  which  never  had  existed,  which,  any 
how,  was  only  a  w'orld  of  memory  and  sentiment.  He  never 
threw  himself  frankly  on  human  life  as  it  is;  he  always  viewed  it 
through  the  veil  of  mist  which  greatly  altered  its  true  colours,  and 
often  distorted  its  proportions.  And  thus  while  more  than  any 
one  he  prepared  the  instruments  and  the  path  for  the  great  triumph, 
he  himself  missed  the  true  field  for  the  highest  exercise  of  poetic 
power ;  he  missed  the  highest  honours  of  that  in  which  hje  led  the 
way. 

Yet,  curiously  enough,  it  seems  as  if,  early  in  his  career,  he 
was  affected  by  the  strong  stream  which  drew  Shakespere. 
Among  the  compositions  of  his  first  period,  besides  The  Shepherd's 
Calendar^  are  Nine  Comedies — clearly  real  plays,  which  his  friend 
Gabriel  Harvey  praised  with  enthusiasm.  As  early  as  1579  Spen- 
ser had  laid  before  Gabriel  Harvey,  for  his  judgment  and  advice,  a 
portion  of  the  Faerie  Qtieene  in  some  shape  or  another,  and  these 
nine  comedies.  He  was  standing  at  the  parting  of  the  ways. 
The  allegory,  with  all  its  tempting  associations  and  machinery, 
with  its  ingenuities  and  pictures,  and  boundless  license  to  vague- 
ness and  to  fancy,  was  on  one  side ;  and  on  the  other,  the  drama, 
with  its  prima  facie  and  superficially  prosaic  aspects,  and  its  kin- 
ship to  what  was  customary  and  commonplace  and  unromantic  in 
human  life.  Of  the  nine  comedies  composed  on  the  model  of 
those  of  Ariosto  and  Machiavelli  and  other  Italians,  every  trace 
has  perished.  But  this  was  Gabriel  Harvey's  opinion  of  the 
respective  value  of  the  two  specimens  of  work  submitted  to  him, 
and  this  was  his  counsel  to  their  author.  In  April,  1580,  he  thus 
writes  to  Spenser  : 

In  good  faith  I  had  once  again  nigh  forgotten  your  Faerie  Quccne  ; 
howbeit,  by  good  chance,  I  have  now  sent  her  home  at  the  last  neither  in 
better  or  worse  case  than  I  found  her.  And  must  you  of  necessity  have 
my  judgment  of  her  indeed  ?  To  be  plain,  I  am  void  of  all  judgment,  if 
your  Ni7Le  Co7nedies^  whereunto  in  imitation  of  Herodotus,  you  give  the 
names  of  the  Nine  Muses  (and  in  one  man's  fancy  not  unworthily),  come 
not  nearer  Ariosto's  comedies,  either  for  the  fineness  of  plausible  elocu- 
tion, or  the  rareness  of  poetical  invention,  than  that  Elvish  Queen  doth  to 
his  Oi'laitdo  Furiosoy  which  notwithstanding  you  will  needs  seem  to  em- 
ulate and  hope  to  overgo,  as  you  flatly  professed  yourself  in  one  of  your 
last  letters. 

"  Besides  that  you  know,  it  hath  been  the  usual  practice  of  the  most 
cxquibite  and  odd  v/its  in  all  nations,  and  specially  in  Italy,  rather  t<i 


SPENSER. 


31 


show,  and  advance  themselves  that  way  than  any  other :  as,  iiaiTiely, 
those  three  notorious  discoursing  heads  liibiena,  Machiavel,  and  Aretino 
did  (to  let  Bembo  and  Ariosto  pass)  with  the  great  admiration  and  won^ 
derment  of  the  whole  country :  being  indeed  reputed  matchable  in  all 
points,  both  for  conceit  of  wit  and  eloquent  deciphering  of  matters  either 
with  Aristophanes  and  Menander  in  Greek,  or  with  Plautus  and  Terence 
m  Latin,  or  with  any  other  in  any  other  tongue.  But  I  will  not  stand 
greatly  witli  you  in  your  own  matters.  If  so  be  the  Faerie  Queene  be 
fairer  in  your  eye  than  the  Nine  Muses,  and  Hobgoblin  run  away  with  the 
garland  from  Apollo  :  mark  what  I  say,  and  yet  I  will  not  say  that  f 
thought,  but  there  is  an  end  for  this  once,  and  fare  you  well,  till  God  or 
some  good  angel  put  you  in  a  better  mind." 

It  is  plain  on  which  side  Spenser's  own  judgment  inclined. 
He  had  probably  written  the  comedies,  as  he  had  written  English 
hexameters,  out  of  deference  to  others,  or  to  try  his  hand.  But 
the  current  of  his  own  secret  thoughts,  those  thoughts,  with  their 
ideals  and  aims,  which  tell  a  man  what  he  is  made  for,  and  where 
his  power  lies,  set  another  way.  The  Faerie  Qiiee7ie  was  "  fairer 
in  his  eyes  than  the  Nine  Muses,  and  Hobgoblin  did  run  away 
with  the  garland  from  Apollo."  What  Gabriel  Harvey  prayed  for 
as  the  "better  mind"  did  not  come.  And  we  cannot  repine  at  a 
decision  which  gave  us,  in  the  shape  which  it  took  at  last,  the  alle- 
gory of  the  Faerie  Queene. 

But  the  Faerie  Queene^  though  already  planned  and  perhaps  be- 
gun, belongs  to  the  last  ten  years  of  the  century,  to  the  season  of 
fulfilment,  not  of  promise,  to  the  blossoming,  not  to  the  opening 
bud.  The  new  hopes  for  poetry  which  Spenser  brought  were 
given  in  a  work,  which  the  Faerie  Queene  has  eclipsed  and 
almost  obscured,  as  the  sun  puts  out  the  morning  star.  Yet  that 
which  marked  a  turning-point  in  the  history  of  our  poetr}^,  was  the 
book  which  came  out,  timidly  and  anonymously,  in  the  end  of 
1579,  or  beginning  of  1 580,  under  the  borrowed  title  of  the 
Shepherd's  Calendar,  a  name  familiar  in  those  days  as  that  of  an 
early  medley  of  astrology  and  homely  receipts  from  time  to  time 
reprinted,  which  was  the  Moore's  or  ZadkieFs  almanac  of  the 
time.  It  was  not  published  ostensibly  by  Spenser  himself,  though 
it  is  inscribed  to  Philip  Sidney  in  a  copy  of  verses  signed  with 
Spenser's  masking  name  oi  hnmeriio^  The  avowed  responsibility 
for  it  might  have  been  inconvenient  for  a  young  man  pushing  his 
fortune  among  the  cross  currents  of  Elizabeth's  court.  But  it  was 
given  to  the  world  by  a  friend  of  the  author's,  signing  himself  E. 
K.,  now  identified  with  Spenser's  fellow-student  at  Pembroke, 
Edward  Kirke,  who  dedicates  it  in  a  long,  critical  epistle  of  some 
interest  to  the  author's  friend,  Gabriel  Harvey,  and,  after  the 
fashion  of  some  of  the  Italian  books  of  poetry,  accompanies  it  with 
a  gloss,  explaining  words,  and  to  a  certain  extent,  allusions.  Two 
things  are  remarkable  in  Kirke's  epistle.  One  is  the  confidence 
with  which  he  announces  the  yet  unrecognized  excellence  of  "  this 
one  new  poet,'*  whom  he  is  not  afraid  to  put  side  by  side  with 
that  good  old  poet,"  Chaucer,  the  "loadstar  of  our  language.'* 


32 


SPEArSER. 


The  other  point  is  the  absolute  reliance  which  he  places  on  the 
powers  of  the  English  language,  handled  by  one  who  has  discerned 
its  genius,  and  is  not  afraid  to  use  its  wealth.  "  In  my  opinion,  it  is 
one  praise  of  many  that  are  due  to  this  poet,  that  he  hath  laboured 
to  restore,  as  to  their  rightful  heritage,  such  good  and  natural 
English  words  as  have  been  long  time  out  of  use,  or  almost  clean 
disherited,  which  is  the  only  cause,  that  our  mother-tongue,  which 
truly  of  itself  is  both  full  enough  for  prose,  and  stately  enough  for 
verse,  hath  long  time  been  counted  most  bare  and  barren  of  both.'* 
The  friends,  Kirke  and  Harvey,  were  not  wrong  in  their  estimate 
of  the  importance  of  Spenser's  work.  The  "new  poet,"  as  he 
came  to  be  customarily  called,  had  really  made  one  of  those  dis- 
tinct steps  in  his  art,  which  answer  to  discoveries  and  inventions 
in  other  spheres  of  human  interest — steps  which  make  all  behind 
them  seem  obsolete  and  mistaken.  There  was  much  in  the  new 
poetry  which  was  hnmature  and  imperfect,  not  a  little  that  was 
fantastic  and  affected.  But  it  was  the  fxrst  adequate  effort  of 
reviving  English  poetry. 

The  Shepherd's  Calendar  cons\s>is>  of  twelve  compositions,  with 
no  other  internal  connexion  than  that  they  are  assigned  respectively 
to  the  twelve  months  of  the  year.  They  are  all  different  in  subject, 
m.etre,  character,  and  excellence.  They  are  called  j^glogues,  ac- 
cording to  the  v/himsical  derivation  adopted  from  the  Italians  of 
the  word  which  the  classical  writers  called  Eclogues  :  j^glogaz, 
as  it  were  alycj^j  or  ahfovotuDv  Xoyoi  ;  that  is,  Goatherd's  Tales." 
The  book  is  in  its  form  an  imitation  of  that  highly  artificial  kind  of 
poetry  which  the  later  Italians  of  the  Renaissance  had  copied  from 
Virgil,  as  Virgil  had  Copied  it  from  the  Sicilian  and  Alexandrian 
Greeks,  and  to  which  had  been  given  the  name  of  Bucolic  or  Pastoral. 
Petrarch,  in  imitation  of  Virgil,  had  written  Latin  Bucolics,  as  he 
had  written  a  Latin  Epic,  his  Af?ica,  He  was  followed  in  the  next 
century  by  Baptista  Mantuanus  (144-81516),  the  "  old  Mantuan," 
of  Holofernes  in  Love''s  Labour'' s  Lost,  whose  Latin  "  Eglogues  " 
became  a  favourite  school-book  in  England,  and  who  was  imitated 
by  a  writer  who  passed  for  a  poet  in  the  time  of  Henry  VIII.,  Alex- 
ander Barclay.  In  the  hands  of  the  Sicilians,  pastoral  poetry  may 
have  been  an  attempt  at  idealising  country  life  almost  as  gen- 
uine as  some  of  Wordswortli*s  poems  ;  but  it  soon  ceased  to  be 
that,  and  in  Alexandrian  hands  it  took  its  place  among  the  recog- 
nised departments  of  classic  and  literary  copying,  in  which  Virgil 
found  and  used  it.  But  a  further  step  had  been  made  since  Virgil 
had  adopted  it  as  an  instrument  of  his  genius.  In  the  hands  of 
Mantuan  and  Barclay  it  was  a  vehicle  for  general  moralising,  and 
in  particular  for  severe  satire  on  women  and  the  clergy.  And  Vir- 
gil, though  he  may  himself  speak  under  the  names  of  Tityrus  and 
Menalcas,  and  lament  Juhus  Caesar  as  Daphnis,  did  not  conceive 
of  the  Roman  world  as  peopled  by  flocks  and  sheep-cotes,  or  its 
emperors  and  chiefs,  its  poets,  senators  and  ladies,  as  shepherds 
and  shepherdesses,  of  higher  or  lower  degree.  But  in  Spenser's 
time,  partly  through  undue  reference  to  what  was  supposed  to  be 


SPENSER. 


33 


Italian  taste,  partly  owing  to  the  tardiness  of  national  culture,  and 
because  the  poeticimpulses  had  not  yet  gained  power  to  force  their 
way  through  the  embarrassment  and  awkwardness  which  accom- 
pany reviving  art — the  world  was  turned,  for  the  purposes  of  the 
poetry  of  civil  lite,  into  a  pastoral  scene.  Poetical  invention  was 
held  to  consist  in  imagining  an  environmont,  a  set  of  outward  cir- 
cumstances, as  unlike  as  possible  to  the  familiar  realities  of  actual 
life  and  enjoyment,  in  which  the  primary  affections  and  passions 
had  their  play.  A  fantastic  basis,  varying  according  to  the  conven- 
tions of  the  fashion,  was  held  essential  for  the  representation  of  the 
ideal.  Masquerade  and  hyperbole  were  the  stage  and  scenery  on 
which  the  poet's  sweetness,  or  tenderness,  or  strength  was  to  be 
put  forth.  The  masquerade,  when  his  subject  belonged  to  peace,  was 
one  of  shepherds :  when  it  was  one  of  war  and  adventure,  it  was  a 
masquerade  of  knight-errantry.  But  a  masquerade  was  necessary,  if 
he  was  to  raise  his  composition  above  the  vulgarities  and  triviali- 
ties of  the  street,  the  fireside,  the  camp,  or  even  the  court  ;  if  he 
was  to  give  it  the  dignity,  the  ornament,  the  unexpected  results,  the 
brightness  and  colour  which  belong  to  poetry.  The  fashion  had 
the  sanction  of  the  brilliant  author  of  the  Arcadia,  the"  Courtier, 
Soldier,  Scholar,"  who  was  the  "  mould  of  form,"  and  whose  judge- 
ment was  law  to  all  men  of  letters  in  the  middle  years  of  Elizabeth, 
the  all-accomplished  Philip  Sidney.  Spenser  submitted  to  this 
from  first  to  last.  When  he  ventured  on  a  considerable  poetical 
enterprise,  he  spoke  his  thoughts,  not  in  his  own  name,  nor  as  his 
contemporaries  ten  years  later  did,  through  the  mouth  of  characters 
in  a  tragic  or  comic  drama,  but  through  imaginary  rustics,  to  whom 
ev^ery  one  else  in  the  world  was  a  rustic,  and  lived  among  the  sheep- 
folds,  with  a  background  of  downs  or  vales  or  fields,  and  the  open 
sky  above.  His  shepherds  and  goatherds  bear  the  homely  names 
of  native  English  clowns,  Diggon  Davie,  Willye,  and  Piers ;  Colin 
Clout,  adopted  from  Skelton,  stands  for  Spenser  himself;  Hob- 
binol,  for  Gabriel  Harvey;  Cuddie,  perhaps  for  Edward  Kirke ; 
names  revived  by  Ambrose  Phillips,  and  laughed  at  by  Pope,  when 
pastorals  again  came  into  vogue  with  the  wits  of  Queen  Anne.* 
With  them  are  mingled  classical  ones  like  Menalcas,  French  ones 
from  Marot,  anagrams  like  Algrind  for  Grindal,  significant  ones  like 
Palinode,  plain  ones  like  Lettice,  and  romantic  ones  like  Rosalind; 
and  no  incongruity  seems  to  be  found  in  matching  a  beautiful  she|> 
herdess  named  Dido  with  a  Great  Shepherd  called  Lobbin,  or,  when 
the  verse  requires  it,  Lobb.  And  not  merely  the  speakers  in  the 
dialogue  are  shepherds  ;  every  one  is  in  their  view  a  shepherd. 
Chaucer  is  the  "  god  of  shepherds,"  and  Orpheus  is  a — 

"  Shepherd  that  did  fetch  his  dame 
From  Plutoe's  baleful  bower  widiouten  leave.'* 

The  "  fair  Elisa'*  is  the  Queen  of  shepherds  all ;  her  great 
father  is  Pan,  the  shepherds'  god  ;  and  Anne  Boleyn  is  Syrinx.  It 

*■  Jn  the  Gu-irdian^  No.  40.   Compare  Johnson's        ^Z* /J  w^r^Pi^  Phillies 


34 


SPENSER, 


is  not  unnatural  that  when  the  clergy  are  spoken  of,  as  they  are  in 
three  of  the  poems,  the  figure  should  be  kept  up.  But  it  is  curious  to 
find  that  the  shepherds'  god,  the  great  Pan,  who  stands  in  one 
connexion  for  Henry  VIII.,  should  in  another  represent  in  sober 
earnest  the  Redeemer  and  Judge  of  the  world.* 

The  poems  framed  in  this  grotesque  setting  are  on  many  themes, 
and  of  various  merit,  and  probably  of  different  dates.  Some  are 
simply  amatory  effusions  of  an  ordinary  character,  full  of  a  lover's 
despair  and  compliment.  Three  or  four  are  translations  or  imi- 
tations ;  translations  from  Marot,  imitations  from  Theocritus,  Bion, 
or  Virgil.  Two  of  them  contain  fables  told  with  great  force  and 
humour.  The  story  of  the  Oak  and  the  Briar,  related,  as  his 
friendly  commentator  Kirke  says,  "  so  lively  and  so  feelingl)^,  as  if 
the  thing  were  set  forth  in  some  picture  before  our  eyes,"  for  the 
warning  of  ^'  disdainful  younkers,"  is  a  first-fruit,  and  promise  of 
Spenser's  skill  in  vivid  narrative.  The  fable  of  the  Fox  and  the 
Kid,  a  curious  illustration  of  the  popular  discontent  at  the  negli- 
gence of  the  clergy,  and  the  popular  suspicions  about  the  arts  of 
Roman  intriguers,  is  told  with  great  spirit,  and  with  mingled 
humour  and  pathos.  There  is,  of  course,  a  poem  in  honour  of  the 
great  queen,  who  was  the  goddess  of  their  idolatry  to  all  the  wits 
and  all  the  learned  of  England,  the  *'faire  Eliza,"  and  a  compliment 
is  paid  to  Leicester, 

"  The  worthy  whom  she  loveth  best, — 
That  first  the  White  Bear  to  the  stake  did  bring.*' 

Two  of  them  are  avowedly  burlesque  imitations  of  rustic  dialect 
and  banter,  carried  on  with  much  spirit.  One  composition  is  a 
funeral  tribute  to  some  unknown  lady;  another  is  a  complaint  of 
the  neglect  of  poets  by  the  great.  In  three  of  the  ^glogues  he 
comes  on  a  more  serious  theme ;  they  are  vigorous  satires  on  the 
loose  living  and  greediness  of  clergy  forgetful  of  their  charge,  with 
strong  invectives  against  foreign  corruption  and  against  the  wiles 
of  tlie  wolves  and  foxes  of  Rome,  with  frequent  allusions  to  passing 
incidents  in  the  guerilla  war  with  the  seminary  priests,  and  with  a 
warm  eulogy  on  the  faithfulness  and  wisdom  of  Archbishop  Grindal ; 
whose  name  is  disguised  as  old  Algrind,  and  with  whom  in  his  dis- 
grace the  poet  is  not  afraid  to  confess  deep  sympathy.  They  are, 
in  a  poetical  form,  part  of  that  manifold  and  varied  system  of 
Puritan  aggression  on  the  established  ecclesiastical  order  of  Eng- 
land, which  went  through  the  whole  scale  from  the  Adonitionm 
to  Parliament,'*  and  the  lectures  of  Cartwright  and  Travers,  to  the 
libels  of  Martin  Mar-prelate  :  a  system  of  attack  which,  with  all  its 
injustice  and  violence,  and  with  all  its  mischievous  purposes,  found 
but  too  much  justification  in  the  inefficiency  and  corruption  of  many 
both  of  the  bishops  and  clergy,  and  in  the  rapacious  and  selfish 
policy  of  the  government,  forced  to  starve  and  cripple  the  public 

*  Shepherd^ s  Calendar ^  May,  July,  and  September. 


SPENSER. 


35 


service,  while  great  men  and  favourites  built  up  their  fortunes  out 
of  the  prodigal  indulgence  of  the  Queen. 

The  collection  ot  poems  is  thus  a  very  miscellaneous  one,  and 
cannot  be  said  to  be  in  its  subjects  inviting.  The  poet's  system  of 
composition,  also,  has  the  disadvantage  of  being  to  a  great  degree 
unreal,  forced,  and  unnatural.  Departing  from  the  precedent  of 
Virgil  and  the  Italians,  but  perhaps  copying  the  artificial  Doric  of 
the  Alexandrians,  he  professes  to  make  his  language  and  style 
suitable  to  the  "ragged  and  rustical"  rudeness  of  the  shepherds 
whom  he  brings  on  the  scene,  by  making  it  both  archaic  and  pro- 
vincial. He  found  in  Chaucer  a  store  of  forms  and  words  suffi- 
ciently well  known  to  be  with  a  Htde  help  intelligible,  and  sufficiently 
out  of  common  use  to  give  the  character  of  antiquity  to  a  poetry 
which  employed  them.  And  from  his  sojourn  in  the  North  he  is 
said  to  have  imported  a  certain  number  of  local  peculiarities  which 
would  seem  unfamihar  and  harsh  in  the  South.  His  editor's 
apology  for  this  use  ot  "ancient  solemn  words'^  as  both  proper  and 
as  ornamental,  is  worth  quoting ;  it  is  an  early  instance  of  what  is 
supposed  to  be  not  yet  common,  a  sense  of  pleasure  in  that  wild- 
ness  which  we  call  picturesque. 

"  And  first  for  the  words  to  speak  :  I  grant  they  be  something  hard, 
and  of  most  men  unused :  yet  English,  and  also  used  of  most  excellent 
Authors  and  most  famous  Poets.  In  whom,  when  as  this  our  Poet  hath 
been  much  travelled  and  thoroughly  read,  how  could  it  be  (as  that  worthy 
Orator  said),  but  that  *  walking  in  the  sun,  although  for  other  cause  he 
walked,  yet  needs  he  mought  be  sunburnt ; '  and  having  the  sound  of  those 
ancient  poets  still  ringing  in  his  ears,  he  mought  needs,  in  singing,  hit  out 
some  of  their  tunes.  But  whether  he  useth  them  by  such  casualty  and 
custom,  or  of  set  purpose  and  choice,  as  thinking  them  fittest  for  such 
rustical  rudeness  of  shepherds,  either  for  that  their  rough  sound  would 
maice  his  rymes  more  ragged  and  rustical,  or  else  because  such  old  and 
obsolete  words  are  most  used  of  country  folks,  sure  I  think,  and  I  think 
not  amiss,  that  they  bring  great  grace,  and,  as  one  would  say,  authority,  to 
the  verse.  .  .  ,  Yet  neither  everywhere  must  old  words  be  stuffed 
in,  nor  the  common  Dialect  and  manner  of  speaking  so  corrupted  thereby, 
that,  as  in  old  buildings,  it  seem  disorderly  and  ruinous.  But  as  in  most 
exquisite  pictures  they  use  to  blaze  and  portrait  not  only  the  dainty  linea- 
ments of  beauty,  but  also  round  about  it  to  shadow  the  rude  thickets  and 
craggy  cliffs,  that  by  the  baseness  of  such  parts,  more  excellency  may  ac- 
crue to  the  principal — for  ofttimes  we  find  ourselves  I  know  not  how, 
singularly  delighted  with  the  show  of  such  natural  rudeness,  and  take 
great  pleasure  in  that  disorderly  order: — even  so  do  these  rough  and  harsh 
terms  enlumine,  and  make  more  clearly  to  appear,  the  brightness  of  brave 
and  glorious  words.  So  oftentimes  a  discord  in  music  maketh  a  comely 
concordance." 

But  when  allowance  is  made  for  an  eclectic  and  sometimes 
pedantic  phraseology,  and  for  mannerisms  to  which  the  fashion  of 
the  age  tempted  him,  such  as  the  extravagant  use  of  alliteration,  or, 
as  they  called  it,  "hunting  the  letter,"  the  Shepherd's  Calendar  is, 
for  its  time,  of  great  interest. 


36 


SPENSER. 


Spenser's  force,  ana  sustained  poetical  power,  and  singularly 
musical  ear  are  conspicuous  in  this  first  essay  of  his  genius.  In 
the  poets  before  him  of  this  century,  fragments  and  stanzas,  and 
perhaps  single  pieces  might  be  found,  which  might  be  compared 
with  his  work.  Fugitive  pieces,  chiefly  amatory,  meet  us  of  real 
sprightliness,  or  grace,  or  tenderness.  The  stanzas  which  Sack- 
ville,  afterwards  Lord  Buckhurst,  contributed  to  the  collection  called 
the  Mirror  of  Magistrates,'^  are  marked  with  apathetic  majesty, 
a  genuine  sympathy  for  the  precariousness  of  greatness,  which 
seem  a  prelude  to  the  Elizabethan  drama.  But  these  fragments 
were  mostly  felicitous  efforts,  which  soon  passed  on  into  the  un- 
gainly, the  uncouth,  the  obscure,  or  the  grotesque.  But  in  the 
Shepherd^s  Calendar  we  have,  for  the  first  time  in  the  century,  the 
swing,  the  command  the  varied  resources  of  the  real  poet,  who  is 
not  driven  by  failing  language  or  thought  into  frigid  or  tumid  ab- 
surdities. Spenser  is  master  over  himself  and  his  instrument  even 
when  he  uses  it  in  a  way  which  offends  our  taste.  There  are  pass- 
ages in  the  Shepherd^s  Calendar  of  poetical  eloquence,  of  refined 
vigour,  and  of  musical  and  imaginative  sweetness,  such  as  the  Eng- 
lish language  had  never  attained  to  since  the  days  of  him  who  was 
to  the  age  of  Spenser  what  Shakspeare  and  Milton  are  to  ours,  the 
pattern  and  fount  of  poetry,  Chaucer.  Dryden  is  not  afraid  to 
class  Spenser  with  Theocritus  and  Virgil,  and  to  write  that  the 
Shepherd s  Calendar  is  not  to  be  matched  in  any  language. f  And 
this  was  at  once  recognised.  The  authorship  of  it,  as  has  been 
said,  was  not  formally  acknowledged.  Indeed,  Mr.  Collier  remarks 
that  seven  years  after  its  publication,  and  after  it  had  gone  through 
three  or  four  separate  editions,  it  was  praised  by  a  contemporary 
poet,  George  Whetstone,  himself  a  friend  of  Spenser's,  as  the 
"  reputed  work  of  Sir  Philip  Sidney."  But  if  it  was  officially  a  se- 
cret, it  was  an  open  secret,  known  to  every  one  who  cared  to  be 
well  informed.  It  is  possible  that  the  free  language  used  in  it 
about  ecclesiastical  abuses  was  too  much  in  sympathy  with  the 
growing  fierceness  and  insolence  of  Puritan  invective  to  be  safely 
used  by  a  poet  who  gave  his  name :  and  one  of  the  reasons  as- 
signed for  Burghley's  dislike  to  Spenser  is  the  praise  bestowed  in 
the  Shepherd^s  Calendar  on  Archbishop  Grindal,  then  in  deep  dis- 
grace for  resisting  the  suppression  of  the  puritan  prophesyings. 
But  anonymous  as  it  was,  it  had  been  placed  under  Sidney's  pro- 
tection ;  and  it  was  at  once  warmly  welcomed.  It  is  not  often  that 
in  those  remote  days  w^e  get  evidence  of  the  immediate  effect  of  a 
book;  but  we  have  this  evidence  in  Spenser's  case.  In  this  year, 
probably,  after  it  was  published,  we  find  it  spoken  of  by  Philip 
Sidney,  not  without  discriminating  criticism,  but  as  one  of  the  few 
recent  examples  of  poetry  worthy  to  be  named  after  Chaucer. 

"  I  account  the  Mirror  of  Magistrates  meetly  furnished  of  beautiful 
parts  ;  and  in  the  Earl  of  Surrey's  Lyrics  many  things  tasting  of  birth,  and 

*  First  published  in  1559.    It  was  a  popular  book,  and  was  often  re-edited, 
t  Dedication  to  Virgil. 


37 


worthy  of  a  noble  mind.  The  Skepherd^s  Calendar  hath  much  poetry  in 
his  Eglogues :  indeed  worthy  the  reading  if  I  be  not  deceived.  That  same 
framing  of  his  style  in  an  old  rustic  language  I  dare  not  allow,  sith  neither 
Theocritus  in  Greek,  Virgil  in  Latin,  nor  Sanazar  in  Italian,  did  affect  it. 
Besides  these  do  I  not  remember  to  have  seen  but  few  (to  speak  boldly) 
printed  that  have  poetical  sinews  in  them." 

Sidney's  patronage  of  the  writer  and  general  approval  of  the 
work  doubtless  had  something  to  do  with  making  Spenser's  name 
known  :  but  he  at  once  takes  a  place  in  contemporary  judgment 
which  no  one  else  takes,  till  the  next  decade  of  the  century.  In 
1586,  Webbe  published  his  Discourse  of  English  Poetrie.  In  tliis, 
tlie  author  of  the  ShephercVs  Calendar  is  spoken  of  by  the  name 

given  him  by  its  Editor,  E.  K  ,  as  the  "  new  poet,"  just  as, 

earlier  in  the  century,  the  Orla?ido  Furioso  was  styled  the  "nuova 
poesia;"  and  his  work  is  copiously  used  to  supply  examples  and 
illustrations  of  the  critic's  rules  and  observations.  Webbe's  re- 
view of  existing  poetry  was  the  most  comprehensive  yet  attempted  : 
but  the  place  which  he  gives  to  the  new  poet,  whose  name  was  in 
men's  mouths,  though,  like  the  author  of  In  Mejnoriam,  he  had 
not  placed  it  on  the  title-page,  was  one  quite  apart. 

"This place  [to  wear  the  Laurel]  have  I  purposely  reserved  for  one, 
who,  if  not  only,  yet  in  my  judgment  principally,  deserveth  the  title  of  the 
lightest  English  poet  that  ever  I  read :  that  is,  the  author  of  the  Shepherd'' s 
Calendar^  intituled  to  the  worthy  Gentleman  Master  Philip  Sidney, 
whether  it  was  Master  Sp.  or  what  rare  scholar  in  Pembroke  Hall  soever, 
because  himself  and  his  friends,  for  what  respect  I  know  not,  would  not  re- 
veal it,  I  force  not  greatly  to  set  down.  Sorry  I  am  that  I  cannot  find  none 
other  with  whom  I  might  couple  him  in  this  catalogue  in  his  rare  gift  of 
poetry:  although  one  there  is,  though  now  long  since  seriously  occupied 
in  graver  studies.  Master  Gabriel  Harvey,  yet  as  he  was  once  his  most 
special  friend  and  fellow  poet,  so  because  he  hath  taken  such  pains  not 
only  in  his  Latin  poetry  .  .  .  but  also  to  reform  our  English  verse  .  .  . 
therefore  will  I  adventure  to  set  them  together  as  two  of  the  rarest  wits 
and  learnedest  masters  of  poetry  in  England." 

He  even  ventured  to  compare  him  favourably  wnth  Virgil. 

"  But  now  yet  at  the  last  hath  England  hatched  up  one  poet  of  this 
sort,  in  my  conscience  comparable  with  the  best  in  any  respect:  even 
Master  Sp.,  author  of  the  Shepherd's  Calendar,  whose  travail  in  that  piece 
of  English  poetry  I  think  verily  is  so  commendable,  as  none  of  equal 
judgment  can  yield  him  less  praise  for  his  excellent  skill  and  skilful  excel- 
lency showed  forth  in  the  same  than  they  would  to  either  Theocritus  or 
Virgil,  whom  in  mine  opinion,  if  the  coarseness  of  our  speech  (I  mean  the 
course  of  custom  which  he  would  not  infringe),  had  been  no  more  let 
unto  him  than  their  pure  native  tongues  were  unto  them,  he  would  have, 
if  it  might  be,  surpassed  them." 

The  courtly  author  of  the  Arte  of  English  Poesie,  1589,  com- 
monly cited  as  G.  Puttenham,  classes  him  with  Sidney.  And  from 
this  time  his  name  occurs  in  every  enumeration  of  English  poeti- 


38 


SPENSER. 


cal  writers,  till  he  appears,  more  than  justifying  this  early  appred. 
ation  of  his  genius,  as  Chaucer's  not  unworthy  successor,  in  the 
Faerie  Queene.  Afterwards,  as  other  successful  poetry  was  writ- 
ten, and  the  standards  of  taste  were  multiplied,  this  first  enthusias- 
tic reception  cooled  down.  In  James  the  First's  time,  Spenser's 
use  of  "old  outworn  words"  is  criticised  as  being  no  more 
"  practical  English  "  than  Chaucer  or  Skelton  :  it  is  not  "  courtly  " 
enough.*  The  success  of  the  Shepherd's  Calendar  had  also,  ap- 
parently, substantial  results,  which  some  of  his  friends  thought  of 
with  envy.  They  believed  that  it  secured  him  high  patronage,  and 
opened  to  him  a  v/ay  to  fortune.  Poor  Gabriel  Harvey,  writing  in 
the  year  in  which  the  Shepherd^s  Calendar  came  out,  contrasts  his 
own  less  favoured  lot,  and  his  ill-repaid  poetical  efforts,  with  Colin 
Clout's  good  luck. 

But  ever  and  ever,  methinks,  your  great  Catoes,  Ecqtdd  erit  pretii^ 
and  our  little  Catoes,  Res  age  q  ike  pro  sunt,  make  such  a  buzzing  and  ring- 
ing in  my  head,  that  I  have  little  joy  to  animate  and  encourage  either  you 
or  him  to  go  forward,  unless  ye  might  make  account  of  some  certain  or- 
dinary wages,  or  at  the  least  wise  have  your  meat  and  drink  for  your  day*s 
works.  As  for  myself,  howsoever  I  have  toyed  and  trifled  heretofore,  I 
am  now  taught,  and  I  trust  I  shall  shortly  learn  (no  remedy,  I  must  of 
mere  necessity  give  you  over  in  the  plain  field),  to  employ  my  travail  and 
time  wholly  or  chiefly  on  those  studies  and  practices  that  carry,  as  they 
say,  meat  in  their  mouth,  having  evermore  their  eye  upon  the  Title,  De 
pane  lucrando^  and  their  hand  upon  their  halfpenny.  For  I  pray  now 
what  saith  Mr.  Cuddie,  alias  you  know  who,  in  the  tenth  ^glogue  of  the 
aforesaid  famous  new  Calendar. 

******** 
'  The  dapper  ditties,  that  I  wont  devise 

To  feed  youths'  fancy  and  the  flocking  fry, 
Delighten  much  :  what  I  the  best  for  thy  ? 

They  han  the  pleasure,  I  a  sclender  prize, 
I  beat  the  bush,  the  birds  to  them  do  fly. 
What  good  thereof  to  Cuddie  can  arise  ? ' 

**But  Master  Colin  Clout  is  not  everybody,  and  albeit  his  old  com- 
panions. Master  Cuddie  and  Master  Hobinoll,  be  as  little  beholding  to 
their  mistress  poetry  as  ever  you  wist: yet  he,  peradventure,  by  the  means 
of  her  special  favour,  and  some  personal  privilege,  may  haply  live  by 
Dving  Pelicans,  and  purchase  great  lands  and  lordships  with  the  money 
which  his  Caletidar  and  D?'eams  have,  and  will  afford  him." 

*  Bolton  in  Haslewood,  ii.  249. 


3PENSER. 


39 


CHAPTER  III. 

SPENSER  IN  IRELAND. 
L1580.] 

In  the  first  week  of  October,  1579,  Spenser  was  at  Leicester 
House,  expecting  next  week  "  to  be  despatched  on  Leicester's 
service  to  France.  Wliether  he  was  sent  or  not,  we  do  not  know. 
Gabriel  Harve}^,  writing  at  the  end  of  the  month,  wagers  that for 
ail  his  saying,  he  will  not  be  gone  over  sea,  neither  this  week  nor 
the  next."  In  one  of  the  i^:glogues  (September)  there  are  some 
lines  which  suggest,  but  do  not  necessarily  imply,  the  experience 
of  an  eye-witness  of  the  state  of  religion  in  a  Roman  Catholic 
country.  But  we  can  have  nothing  but  conjecture  whether  at  this 
time  or  any  other  Spenser  was  on  the  Continent.  The  Shepherd'' s 
Calendar  v^zs  entered  at  Stationers'  Hall,  December  5,  1579.  In 
April,  1580,  as  we  know  from  one  of  his  letters  to  Harvey,  he  was 
at  Westminster.  He  speaks  of  the  Shepherd's  Calendar  as 
published ;  he  is  contemplating  the  publication  of  other  pieces, 
and  then  ''he  will  in  hand  forthwith  with  his  Faerie  Queene''  of 
v^hich  he  had  sent  Harvey  a  specimen.  He  speaks  especially  of 
his  Dreams  as  a  considerable  work. 

"  I  take  best  my  Dreams  should  come  forth  alone,  being  grown  by 
means  of  the  Gloss  (running  continually  in  manner  of  a  Paraphrase)  full 
as  great  as  my  Calendar.  Therein  be  some  things  excellently,  and  many 
things  wittily  discoursed  of  E.  K.,  and  the  pictures  so  singularly  set  forth 
and  portrayed,  as  if  Michael  Angelo  were  there,  he  could  (I  think)  nor 
amend  the  best,  nor  reprehend  the  Jv'orst.  I  know  you  would  like  them 
passing  well.'* 

It  is  remarkable  that  of  a  book  so  spoken  of,  as  of  the  Nine 
Comedies,  not  a  trace,  as  far  as  appears,  is  to  be  found.  He  goes 
onto  speak  with  much  satisfaction  of  another  composition,  which 
was  probably  incorporated,  like  the  Epithala7nio7i  Thamesis^  in  his 
later  work. 

*'  Of  my  Stemmata  Dudleiana^  and  specially  of  the  sundry  Apostrophes 
therein,  addressed  you  know  to  whom,  much  more  advisement  he  had, 
than  so  lightly  to  send  them  abroad :  now  list,  trust  me  (though  I  do  never 
very  well)  yet,  in  mine  own  fancy,  I  never  did  better.  Veruntame7t  te  seqtior 
solurfi  :  mutquatn  vero  assequar.^'* 


40 


SPENSER, 


He  is  plainly  not  dissatisfied  with  his  success,  and  is  looking 
forward  to  more.  But  no  one  in  those  days  could  live  by  poetry. 
Even  scholars,  in  spite  of  university  endowments,  did  not  hope  to 
live  by  their  scholarship;  and  the  poet  or  man  of  letters  only 
trusted  that  his  work,  by  attracting  the  favour  of  the  great,  might 
open  to  him  the  door  of  advancement.  Spenser  was  probably 
expecting  to  push  his  fortunes  in  some  public  employment  under 
the  patronage  of  two  such  powerful  favourites  as  Sidney  and  his 
uncle  Leicester.  Spenser's  heart  was  set  on  poetry:  but  what 
leisure  he  might  have  for  it  would  depend  on  the  course  his  life 
might  take.  To  have  hung  on  Sidney's  protection,  or  gone  with 
him  as  his  secretary  to  the  wars,  to  have  been  employed  at  home 
or  abroad  in  Leicester's  intrigues,  to  have  stayed  in  London  filling 
by  Leicester's  favour  some  government  office,  to  have  had  his 
habits  moulded  and  his  thoughts  affected  by  the  brilliant  and  un- 
scrupulous society  of  the  court,  or  by  the  powerful  and  daring 
minds  which  were  fast  thronging  the  political  and  literary  scene — 
any  of  these  contingencies  might  have  given  his  poetical  faculty  a 
different  direction  ;  nay,  might  have  even  abridged  its  exercise 
or  suppressed  it.  But  his  life  was  otherwise  ordered.  A  new 
opening  presented  itself.  He  had,  and  he  accepted,  the  chance  of 
making  his  fortune  another  way.  And  to  his  new  manner  of  life, 
with  its  peculiar  conditions,  may  be  ascribed,  not,  indeed,  the 
original  idea  of  that  which  vv^as  to  be  his  great  work,  but  the  cir- 
cumstances under  which  the  work  was  carried  out,  and  which  not 
merely  coloured  it,  but  gave  it  some  of  its  special  and  charac- 
teristic features. 

That  which  turned  the  course  of  his  career,  and  exercised  a 
decisive  influence,  certainly  on  its  events  and  fate,  probably  also 
on  the  turn  of  his  thoughts  and  the  shape  and  moulding  of  his 
work,  was  his  migration  to  Ireland,  and  his  settlement  there  for 
the  greater  part  of  the  remaining  eighteen  years  of  his  life.  We 
know  little  more  than  the  main  facts  of  this  change  from  the  court 
and  the  growing  intellectual  activity  of  England,  to  the  fierce  and 
narrow  interests  of  a  cruel  and  unsuccessful  struggle  for  col- 
onization, in  a  country  which  was  to  England  much  what  Algeria 
was  to  France  some  thirty  years  ago.  Ireland,  always  unquiet, 
had  become  a  serious  danger  to  Elizabeth's  Government.  It  was 
its  "  bleeding  ulcer."  Lord  Essex's  great  colonising  scheme,  with 
his  unscrupulous  severity,  had  failed.  Sir  Henry"  Sidney,  wise, 
firm,  and  wishing  to  be  just,  had  tried  his  hand  as  Deputy  for  the 
third  time  in  the  thankless  charge  of  keeping  order;  he,  too,  after 
a  short  gleam  of  peace,  had  failed  also.  For  two  years  Ireland 
had  been  left  to  the  local  administration,  totally  unable  to  heal  its 
wounds,  or  cope  with  its  disorders.  And  now,  the  kingdom 
threatened  to  become  a  vantage-ground  to  the  foreign  enemy.  In 
November,  1 579,  the  Government  turned  their  eyes  on  Arthur, 
L^^'d  Grey  of  Wilton,  a  man  of  high  character,  and  a  soldier  of 
distinction.  He,  or  they,  seemed  to  have  hesitated  ;  or,  rather, 
the  hesitation  v/as  on  both  sides.    He  was  not  satisfied  with  many 


SI'EJVSER. 


41 


things  in  tlie  policy  of  the  Queen  in  England  :  his  discontent  had 
led  him,  strong  Protestant  as  he  was,  to  coquet  with  Norfolk  and  the 
partisans  of  Mary  Queen  of  Scots,  when  England  was  threatened 
with  a  French  marriage  ten  years  before.  His  name  stands  among 
the  forty  nobles  on  whom  Mary's  friends  counted.*  And  on  the 
other  hand,  Elizabeth  did  not  like  him  or  trust  him.  For  some 
time  she  refused  to  employ  him.  At  length,  in  the  summer  of 
1580,  he  was  appointed  to  fill  that  great  place  which  had  wrecked 
the  reputation  and  broken  the  hearts  of  a  succession  of  able  and 
high-spirited  servants  of  the  English  Crown,  the  place  of  Lord- 
Deputy  in  Ireland.  He  was  a  man  who  was  interested  in  the  lit- 
erary enterprise  of  the  time.  In  the  midst  of  his  public  employ- 
ment in  Holland,  he  had  been  the  friend  and  patron  of  George 
Gascoigne,  who  left  a  hicrh  reputation,  for  those  days,  as  poet, 
wit,  satirist,  and  critic.  Lord  Grey  now  took  Spenser,  the  new 
poet,"  the  friend  of  Philip  Sidney,  to  Ireland  as  his  Secretary. 

Spenser  was  not  the  only  scholar  and  poet  who  about  this  time 
found  public  employment  in  Ireland.  Names  which  appear  in 
literary  records,  such  as  Warton's  History  of  English  Poetry^ 
poets  like  Barnaby  Googe  and  Ludovic  Bryskett,  reappear  as  de- 
spatch-writers or  agents  in  the  Irish  State  Papers.  J)Ut  one  man 
came  over  to  Ireland  about  the  same  time  as  Spenser,  whose 
fortunes  were  a  contrast  to  his.  Geoffrey  Fenton  was  one  of  the 
numerous  translators  of  the  time.  He  had  dedicated  Tragical 
Tales  from  the  French  and  Italian  to  Lady  Mary  Sidney,  Guevara's 
Epistles  from  the  Spanish  to  Lady  Oxford,  and  a  translation  of 
Guicciardini  to  the  Queen.  About  this  time,  he  was  recommended 
by  his  brother  to  Walsingham  for  foreign  service;  he  was  soon 
after  in  Ireland  :  and  in  the  summer  of  1 580  he  was  made  Secretary 
to  the  Government.  He  shortly  became  one  of  the  most  important 
persons  in  the  Irish  administration.  He  corresponded  confidentially 
and  continually  with  Burghley  and  Walsingham.  He  had  his  eye  on 
the  proceedings  of  Deputies  and  Presidents,  and  reported  freely 
their  misdoings  or  their  unpopularity.  His  letters  form  a  consider- 
able part  of  the  Irish  Papers.  He  became  a  powerful  and  successful 
public  servant.  He  became  Sir  Geoffrey  Ponton  ;  he  kept  his 
high  place  for  his  life  ;  he  obtained  grants  and  lands  ;  and  he  was 
commemorated  as  a  great  personage  in  a  pompous  monument  in 
St.  Patrick's  Cathedral.  This  kind  of  success  was  not  to  be 
Spenser's. 

Lord  Grey  of  Wilton  was  a  man  in  whom  his  friends  saw  a  high 
and  heroic  spirit.  He  was  a  statesman  in  whose  motives  and  ac- 
tions his  religion  had  a  dominant  influence  :  and  his  religion — he 
is  called  by  the  vague  name  of  Puritan — was  one  which  combined 
a  strong  and  doubtless  genuine  zeal  for  the  truth  of  Christian  doc- 
trine and  for  purity  of  morals,  with  the  deepest  and  deadliest  hatred 
of  what  he  held  to  be  their  natural  enemy,  the  Antichrist  of  Rome. 
The  "  good  Lord  Grey,"  he  was,  if  we  believe  his  secretary,  writing 


*  Froude,  x.  158. 


42 


SPENSER. 


many  years  after  this  time,  and  when  he  was  dead,  "  most  gentle, 
affable,  loving,  and  temperate ;  always  known  to  be  a  most  just, 
sincere,  godly,  and  right  noble  man,  far  from  sternness,  far  from 
unrighteousness."  But  the  infelicity  of  his  times  bore  hardly  upon 
him,  and  Spenser  admits,  what  is  known  otherwise,  that  he  left  a 
terrible  name  behind  him.  He  was  certainly  a  man  of  severe  and 
unshrinking  sense  of  duty,  and  like  many  great  Englishmen  of  the 
time,  so  resolute  in  carrying  it  out  to  the  end,  that  it  reached,  when 
he  thought  it  necessary,  to  the  point  of  ferocity.  Naturally,  he 
had  enemies,  who  did  not  spare  his  fame ;  and  Spenser,  who  came 
to  admire  and  reverence  him,  had  to  lament  deeply  that  that  good 
lord  was  blotted  with  the  name  of  a  bloody  man,"  one  who  ''re- 
garded not  the  life  of  the  queen's  subjects  no  more  than  dogs,  and 
had  wasted  and  consumed  all,  so  as  now  she  had  nothing  almost 
left,  but  to  reign  in  their  ashes." 

Lord  Grey  was  sent  over  at  a  moment  of  the  utmost  confusion 
and  danger.  In  July,  1579,  Drury  wrote  to  Burghley  to  stand 
firmly  to  the  helm,  for  "  that  a  great  storm  was  at  hand."  The 
South  of  Ireland  was  in  fierce  rebellion,  under  the  Earl  of  Des- 
mond and  Dr.  Nicolas  Sanders,  who  was  acting  under  the  com*- 
mission  of  the  Pope,  and  promising  the  assistance  of  the  King  of 
Spain;  and  a  band  of  Spanish  and  Italian  adventurers,  unauthor- 
ised, but  not  uncountenanced  by  their  Government,  like  Drake  in 
the  Indies,  had  landed  with  arms  and  stores,  and  had  fortified  a 
port  at  Smerwick,  on  the  south-western  coast  of  Kerry.  The 
North  was  deep  in  treason,  restless,  and  threatening  to  strike. 
Round  Dublin  itself,  the  great  Irish  Lords  of  the  Pale,  under  Lord 
Baitinglass,  in  the  summer  of  1580  had  broken  into  open  insurrec- 
tion, and  were  holding  out  a  hand  to  the  rebels  of  the  South.  The 
English  garrison,  indeed,  small  as  they  were,  could  not  only  hold 
their  own  against  the  ill-armed  and  undisciplined  Irish  bands,  but 
could  inflict  terrible  chastisement  on  the  insurgents.  The  native 
feuds  were  turned  to  account ;  Butlers  were  set  to  destroy  their 
natural  enemies,  the  Geraldines  ;  and  the  Earl  of  Ormond,  their 
head,  was  appointed  General  in  Munster,  to  execute  English  ven- 
geance and  his  own  on  the  lands  and  people  of  his  rival  Desmond. 
But  the  English  chiefs  were  not  strong  enough  to  put  down  the 
revolt.  "The  conspiracy  throughout  Ireland,"  wrote  Lord  Grey, 
"  is  so  general,  that  without  a  main  force  it  will  not  be  appeased. 
There  are  cold  service  and  unsound  dealing  generally."  On  the 
1 2th  of  August,  1580,  Lord  Grey  landed,  amid  a  universal  wreck 
of  order,  of  law,  of  mercy,  of  industry;  and  among  his  counsellors 
and  subordinates,  the  only  remedy  thought  of  was  that  of  remorse- 
less and  increasing  severity. 

It  can  hardly  be  doubted  that  Spenser  must  have  come  over 
with  him.  It  is  likely  that  where  he  went  his  Secretary  would 
accompany  him.  And  if  so,  Spenser  must  soon  have  become 
acquainted  with  some  of  the  scenes  and  necessities  of  Irish  life. 
Within  three  weeks  after  Lord  Grey's  landing,  he  and  those  with 
him  were  present  at  the  disaster  of  Glenmalure,  a  rocky  defile  neaf 


SPENSER. 


43 


Wicklovv,  where  the  rebels  enticed  the  Englisli  captains  into  a 
position  in  which  an  ambuscade  had  been  prepared,  after  the  man- 
ner of  Red  Indians  in  the  last  century,  and  of  South  African 
savages  now,  and  where,  in  spite  of  Lord  Grey's  courage,  "which 
could  not  have  been  bettered  by  Hercules,"  a  bloody  defeat  was 
inflicted  on  his  troops,  and  a  number  of  distinguished  officers  were 
cut  off.  But  Spenser  was  soon  to  see  a  still  more  terrible  example 
of  this  ruthless  warfare.  It  was  necessary,  above  all  things,  to  de- 
stroy the  Spani'sh  fort  at  Smerwick,  in  order  to  prevent  the  rebel- 
lion being  fed  from  abroad :  and  in  November,  1 580,  Lord  Grey  in 
person  undertook  the  work.  The  incidents  of  this  tragedy  have 
been  fully  recorded,  and  they  formed  at  the  time  a  heavy  charge 
against  Lord  Grey's  humanity,  and  even  his  honour.  In  this  in- 
stance Spenser  must  almost  certainly  have  been  on  the  spot. 
Years  afterwards,  in  his  View  of  the  State  of  Ireland^  he  describes 
and  vindicates  Lord  Grey's  proceedings ;  and  he  does  so,  "  being," 
as  he  writes,  "  as  near  them  as  any."  And  we  have  Lord  Grey's  own 
despatch  to  Queen  Elizabeth,  containing  a  full  report  of  the  tragical 
business.  We  have  no  means  of  knowing  how  Lord  Grey  em- 
ployed Spenser,  or  whether  he  composed  his  own  despatches.  But 
from  Spenser's  posidon,  the  Secretary,  if  he  had  not  some  hand  in 
the  following  vivid  and  forcible  account  of  the  taking  of  Smerwick,* 
must  probably  have  been  cognizant  of  it  ;  though  there  are  some 
slight  differences  in  the  despatch,  and  in  the  account  which 
Spenser  himself  wrote  afterwards  in  his  pamphlet  on  Irish  Affairs. 

After  describing  the  proposal  of  the  garrison  for  a  parley.  Lord 
Grey  proceeds — 

"  There  was  presently  sent  unto  me  one  Alexandre,  their  camp  master ; 
he  told  me  that  certain  Spaniards  and  Italians  were  there  arrived  upon 
fair  speeches  and  great  promises,  which  altogether  vain  and  false  they 
found;  and  that  it  was  no  part  of  their  intent  to  molest  or  take  any  gov- 
ernment from  your  Majesty ;  for  proof,  that  they  were  ready  to  depart  as 
they  came  and  deliver  into  my  hands  the  fort.  Mine  answer  was,  that  for 
that  I  perceived  their  people  to  stand  of  two  nations,  Italian  and  Spanish, 
I  would  give  no  answer  unless  a  Spaniard  was  likewise  by.  He  presently 
went  and  returned  with  a  Spanish  captain.  I  then  told  the  Spaniard  that 
I  knew  their  nation  to  have  an  absolute  prince,  one  that  was  in  good 
league  and  amity  with  your  Majesty,  which  made  me  to  marvell  that  any 
of  his  people  should  be  found  associate  with  them  that  went  about  to 
maintain  rebels  against  you.  .  .  .  And  taking  it  that  it  could  not  be  his 
king's  will,  I  was  to  know  by  whom  and  for  what  cause  they  were  sent. 
His  reply  was  that  the  king  had  not  sent  them,  but  that  one  John  Martinez 
de  Ricaldi,  Governor  for  the  king  at  Bilboa,  had  willed  him  to  levy  a  band 
and  repair  with  it  to  St.  Andrews  (Santander),  and  there  to  be  directed 
by  this  their  colonel  here,  whom  he  followed  as  a  blind  man,  not  knowing 
whither.  The  other  avouched  that  they  were  all  sent  by  the  Pope  for  the 
defence  of  the  Catholica  fede.  My  answer  was,  that  I  would  not  greatly 
have  marvelled  if  men  being  commanded  by  natural  and  absolute  princes 
did  sometimes  take  in  hand  wrong  actions ;  but  that  men,  and  that  of 

*  Calendar  of  State  Papers,  Ireland,  1574—1585-  J^Ir.  H.  C.  Hamilton's  Pref.  p. 
Ixxi.-lxxiii.    Nov.  12,  1580. 


44 


SPENSER. 


r.ccount  as  some  of  them  made  show  of,  should  be  carried  into  unjust, 
desperate,  and  wicked  actions,  by  one  that  neither  from  God  or  man  could 
claim  any  princely  power  or  empire,  but  (was)  indeed  a  detestable  shave- 
ling, the  right  Antichrist  and  general  ambitious  tyrant  over  all  right  prin- 
cipalities, and  patron  of  the  Diabolica  fcde — this  I  could  not  but  greatly 
rest  in  wonder.  Their  fault  therefore  far  to  be  aggravated  by  the  vileness 
of  their  commander ;  and  that  at  my  hands  no  condition  or  composition 
they  were  to  expect,  other  than  they  should  render  me  the  fort,  and  yield 
their  selves  to  my  will  for  life  or  death.  With  this  answer  he  departed  ; 
after  which  there  was  one  or  two  courses  to  and  fro  more,  to  have  gotten 
a  certainty  for  some  of  their  lives  :  but  finding  that  it  would  not  be,  the 
colonel  himself  about  sunsetting  came  forth  and  requested  respite  with 
surcease  of  arms  till  the  next  morning,  and  then  he  would  give  a  resolute 
answer. 

Finding  that  to  be  but  a  gain  of  time  to  them,  and  a  loss  of  the  same 
for  myself,  I  definitely  answered  I  would  not  grant  it,  and  therefore  pres- 
ently either  that  he  took  my  offer  or  else  return  and  I  would  fall  to  my 
business.  lie  then  embraced  my  knees  simply  putting  himself  to  my 
mercy,  only  he  prayed  that  for  that  night  he  might  abide  in  the  fort,  and 
that  in  the  morning  all  should  be  put  into  my  hands.  I  asked  hostages 
for  the  performance  ;  they  were  given.  Morning  came  ;  I  presented  my 
companies  in  battle  before  the  fort,  the  colonel  comes  forth  with  ten  or 
twelve  of  his  chief  gentlemen,  trailing  their  ensigns  rolled  up,  and  pre- 
sented them  unto  me  with  their  lives  and  the  fort.  I  sent  straight  certain 
gentlemen  in,  to  see  their  weapons  and  armour  laid  down,  and  to  guard 
the  munition  and  victual  there  left  for  spoil.  Then  I  put  in  certain  bands, 
who  straight  fell  to  execution.  There  were  six  hundred  slain.  Munition 
and  victual  great  store  :  though  much  wasted  through  the  disorder  of  the 
soldier,  which  in  that  fury  could  not  be  helped.  Those  that  I  gave  life 
unto,  I  have  bestowed  upon  the  captains  and  gentlemen  whose  service 
hath  well  deserved.  ...  Of  the  six  hundred  slain,  four  hundred  were  as 
gallant  and  goodly  personages  as  of  any  (soldiers)  I  ever  beheld.  So  hath 
it  pleased  the  Lord  of  Hosts  to  deliver  your  enemies  into  your  Highness' 
hand,  and  so  too  as  one  only  excepted,  not  one  of  yours  is  either  lost  or 
hurt.'' 

Another  account  adds  to  this  that  "  the  Irish  men  and  women 
were  hanged,  with  an  Englishman  who  had  served  Dr.  Sanders, 
and  two  others  whose  arms  and  legs  were  broken  for  torture.'^ 

Such  scenes  as  those  of  Glenmalure  and  Smerwick,  terrible  as 
they  were,  it  might  have  been  any  one's  lot  to  witness  who  lived 
himself  in  presence  of  the  atrocious  warfare  of  those  cruel  days,  in 
which  the  ordinary  exasperation  of  combatants  was  made  more 
savage  and  unforgiving  by  religious  hatred,  and  by  the  license 
wdiich  religious  hatred  gave  to  irregular  adventure  and  the  sanguin- 
ary repression  of  it.  They  were  not  confined  to  Ireland.  Two 
years  later  the  Marquis  de  Santa  Cruz  treated  in  exactly  the  same 
fashion  a  band  of  French  adventurers,  some  eighty  noblemen  and 
gentlemen  and  two  hundred  soldiers,  who  were  taken  in  an  at' 
tempt  on  the  Azores  during  a  time  of  nominal  peace  between  the 
crowns  of  France  and  Spain.  In  the  Low  Countries,  and  in  the 
religious  wars  of  France,  it  need  not  be  said  that  even  the  "  execu- 
tion "at  Smerwick  was  continually  outdone;  audit  is  what  the 
Spaniards  would  of  course  have  done  to  Drake  if  they  had  caught 


SPEA^SER. 


45 


him.  Nor  did  the  Spanish  Government  complain  of  this  treatment 
of  its  subjects,  who  had  no  legal  commission. 

But  the  change  of  scene  and  life  to  Spenser  was  much  more 
than  merely  the  sight  of  a  disastrous  skirmish  and  a  capitulation 
without  quarter.  He  had  passed  to  an  entirely  altered  condition 
of  social  life ;  he  had  passed  from  pleasant  and  merry  England, 
with  its  comparative  order  and  peace,  its  thriving  homesteads  and 
wealthy  cities,  its  industry  and  magnificence — 

"  Eliza's  blessed  field, 
That  still  with  people,  peace,  and  plenty  flows- 

to  a  land,  beautiful  indeed,  and  alluring,  but  of  which  the  only  law 
was  disorder,  and  the  only  rule  failure.  The  Cambridge  student, 
the  follower  of  country  life  in  Lancashire  or  Kent,  the  scholar  dis- 
cussing with  Philip  Sidney  and  corresponding  with  Gabriel  Harvey 
about  classical  metres  and  English  rimes ;  the  shepherd  poet, 
Colin  Clout,  delicately  fashioning  his  innocent  pastorals,  his  love 
complaints,  or  his  dexterous  panegyrics  or  satires ;  the  courtier, 
aspiring  to  shine  in  the  train  of  Leicester  before  the  eyes  of  the 
great  queen — found  himself  transplanted  into  a  wild  ancl  turbulent 
savagery,  where  the  elements  of  civil  society  hardly  existed,  and 
which  had  the  fatal  power  of  drawing  into  its  own  evil  and  lawless 
ways  the  English  who  came  into  contact  with  it.  Ireland  had  tlie 
name  and  the  framework  of  a  Christian  realm.  It  had  its  hierarchy 
of  officers  in  Church  and  State,  its  Parliament,  its  representative 
of  the  Crown.  It  had  its  great  earls  and  lords,  with  noble  and 
romantic  titles,  its  courts  and  councils  and  administration ;  tlie 
Queen's  laws  were  there,  and  where  they  were  acknowledged, 
which  was  not,  however,  everywhere,  the  English  speech  was  cur- 
rent. But  underneath  this  name  and  outside,  all  was  coarse,  and 
obstinately  set  against  civilized  order.  There  was  nothing  but 
the  wreck  and  clashing  of  disintegrated  customs,  the  lawlessness 
of  fierce  and  ignorant  barbarians,  whose  own  laws  had  been  de- 
stroyed, and  who  would  recognize  no  other ;  the  blood-feuds  of 
rival  septs  ;  the  ambitious  and  deadly  treacheries  of  rival  nobles, 
oppressing  all  weaker  than  themselves,  and  maintaining  in  waste 
and  idleness  their  crowds  of  brutal  retainers.  In  one  thing  only 
was  there  agreement,  though  not  even  in  this  was  there  union; 
and  that  was  in  deep,  implacable  hatred  of  their  English  masters. 
And  with  these  English  masters,  too,  amid  their  own  jealousies  and 
back-bitings  and  mischief-making,  their  own  bitter  antipathies  and 
chronic  despair,  there  was  only  one  point  of  agreement,  and  that 
was  their  deep  scorn  and  loathing  of  the  Irish. 

This  is  Irish  dealing  with  Irish,  in  Munster,  at  this  time : 

The  Lord  Roche  kept  a  freeholder,  who  had  eight  plowlands,  priS' 
oner,  and  hand-locked  him  till  he  had  surrendered  seven  plowlands  and  a 
half,  on  agreement  to  keep  the  remaining  plow] and  free  :  but  when  this 
was  done,  the  Lord  Roche  extorted  as  manv  exactions  from  thnt  half- 
plowland,  as  from  any  other  half-plowland  in  his  country.  .  .  .  And  even 


46 


SPENSE/^. 


the  great  men  were  under  the  same  oppression  from  the  greater  :  for  the 
Earl  of  Desmond  forcibly  took  away  the  Seneschal  of  Imokilly's  corn 
from  his  own  land,  though  he  was  one  of  the  most  considerable  gentlemen 
in  Munster."* 

And  this  is  English  dealing  with  Irish  : 

Mr.  Henry  Sheffield  asks  Lord  Burghley's  interest  with  Sir  George 
Carew,  to  be  made  his  deputy  at  Leighlin,  in  place  of  Mr.  Ba'genall,  who 
met  his  death  under  the  following  circumstances : 

"Mr.  Bagenali,  after  he  had  bought  the  barony  of  Odrone  of  Sir 
George  Carew,  could  not  be  contented  to  let  the  Kavanaghs  enjoy  such 
lands  as  old  Sir  Peter  Carew,  young  Sir  Peter,  and  last,  Sjr  George  were 
content  that  they  should  have,  but  threatened  to  kill  them  wherever  he 
could  meet  them.  As  it  is  now  fallen  out,  about  the  last  of  November, 
one  Henry  Heron,  Mr.  Begenall's  brother-in-law,  having  lost  four  kine, 
making  that  his  quarrel,  he  being  accompanied  with  divers  others  to  the 
number  of  twenty  or  thereabouts,  by  the  procurement  of  his  brother-in- 
law,  went  to  the  house  of  Mortagh  Oge,  a  man  seventy  years  old,  the  chief 
of  the  Kavanaghs,  with  their  swords  drawn :  which  the  old  man  seeing, 
for  fear  of  his  life,  sought  to  go  into  the  woods,  but  was  taken  and  brought 
before  Mr.  Heron,  who  charged  him  that  his  son  had  taken  the  cows. 
The  old  man  answered  that  he  could  pay  for  them.  Mr.  Heron  would 
not  be  contented,  but  bade  his  men  kill  him,  he  desiring  to  be  brought  for 
trial  at  the  sessions.  Further,  the  morrow  after  they  went  again  into  the 
woods,  and  there  they  found  another  old  man,  a  servant  of  Mortagh  Oge, 
and  likewise  killed  him,  Mr.  Heron  saying  that  it  was  because  he  would 
not  confess  the  cows. 

"On these  murders,  the  sons  of  the  old  man  laid  an  ambush  for  Mr, 
Bagenali ;  who,  following  them  more  upon  will  than  with  discretion,  fell 
into  their  hands,  and  was  slain  with  thirteen  more.  He  had  sixteen 
wounds  above  his  girdle,  and  one  of  his  legs  cut  off,  and  his  tongue 
drawn  out  of  his  mouth  and  slit.  There  is  not  one  man  dv/elling  in  all 
this  country  that  was  Sir  George  Carew's,  but  every  man  fled,  and  left  the 
whole  country  waste  ;  and  so  I  fear  me  it  will  continue,  now  the  deadly 
feud  is  so  great  between  them."  t 

Something  like  this  has  been  occasionally  seen  in  our  colonies 
towards  the  native  races;  but  there  it  never  reached  the  same 
height  of  unrestrained  and  frankly  justified  indulgence.  The  Eng- 
lish officials  and  settlers  knew  well  enough  that  the  only  thought  of 
the  native  Irish  was  to  restore  their  abolished  customs,  to  recover 
their  confiscated  lands,  to  re-establish  the  crippled  power  of  their 
chiefs  ;  they  knew  that  for  this  insurrection  was  ever  ready,  and 
that  treachery  would  shrink  from  nothing.  And  to  meet  it,  the 
English  on  the  spot — all  but  a  few  who  were  denounced  as  un- 
practical sentimentalists  for  favouring  an  irreconcilable  foe — could 
think  of  no  way  of  enforcing  order  except  by  a  wholesale  use  of  the 
sword  and  the  gallows.  They  could  find  no  means  of  restoring 
peace  except  turning  the  rich  land  into  a  wilderness,  and  rooting 
out  by  famine  those  whom  the  soldier  or  the  hangman  had  notover- 


♦  Cox,  Hist,  of  Ireland,  354. 


t  Irish  Papers,  March  29,  1587. 


SPENSER. 


47 


taken.  "  No  governor  shall  do  any  good  here,"  wrote  an  EngHsh 
observer  in  1581,    except  he  show  himself  a  Tamerlane." 

In  a  general  account,  even  contemporary,  such  statements  might 
suggest  a  violent  suspicion  of  exaggeration.    We  possess  the  means 
of  testing  it.    The  Irish  State  Papers  of  the  time  contain  the  ample 
reports  and  letters,  from  day  to  day,  of  the  energetic  and  resolute 
Englishmen  employed  in  council  or  in  the  field — men  of  business 
like  Sir  William  Pelham,  Sir  Henry  Wallop,  Edward  Waterhouse, 
and  Geoffrey  Fenton ; — daring  and  brilliant  officers  like  Sir  Wil- 
liam Drury,  Sir  Nicolas  Malby,  Sir  Warham  St.  Leger,  Sir  John 
Norreys,  and  John  Zouch.    These  papers  are  the  basis  of  Mr. 
P>oude's  terrible  chapters  on  the  Desmond  rebellion,  and  their 
substance  in  abstract  or  abridgment  is  easily  accessible  in  the 
printed  calendars  of  the  Record  Office.    They  show  that  from  first 
to  last,  in  principle  and  practice,  in  council  and  in  act,  the  Tamer- 
lane system  was  believed  in,  and  carried  out  without  a  trace  of 
remorse  or  question  as  to  its  morality.      If  hell  were  open,  and  all 
the  evil  spirits  were  abroad,"  writes  Walsingham's  correspondent, 
Andrew  Trollope,  who  talked  about  Tamerlane,  ''they  could  never 
be  worse  than  these  Irish  rogues — rather  dogs,  and  worse  than 
dogs,  for  dogs  do  but  after  their  kind,  and  they  degenerate  from  all 
humanity."    There  is  but  one  way  of  dealing  with  wild  dogs  or 
wolves  ;  and  accordingly  the  Enghsh  chiefs  insisted  that  this  was 
the  way  to  deal  with  the  Irish.    The  state  of  Ireland,  writes  one, 
*'  is  like  an  old  cloak  often  before  patched,  wherein  is  now  made  so 
great  a  gash  that  all  the  world  doth  know  that  there  is  no  remedy 
but  to  make  a  new."    This  means,  in  the  language  of  another, 
*'that  there  is  no  way  to  daunt  these  people  but  by  the  edge  of  the 
sword,  and  to  plant  better  in  their  place,  or  rather,  let  them  cut  one 
another's  throats."    These  were  no  idle  words.    Every  page  of 
these  papers  contains  some  memorandum  of  execution  and  destruc- 
tion.   The  progress  of  a  Deputy,  or  the  President  of  a  province, 
through  the  country  is  always  accompanied  with  its  tale  of  hang- 
ings.   There  is  sometimes  a  touch  of  the  grotesque.    "  At  Kil- 
kenny," writes  Sir  W.  Drury,  "the  jail  being  full,  we  caused  ses- 
sions immediately  to  begin.    Thirty-six  persons  were  executed, 
among  which  some  good  ones — two  for  treason,  a  blackamoor,  and 
two  v/itches  by  natural  law,  for  that  we  found  no  law  to  try  them 
l)y  in  this  realm.''    It  is  like  the  account  of  some  unusual  kind  of 
game  in  a  successful  bag.    "  If  taking  of  cows,  and  killing  of  kerne 
and  churles  had  been  worth  advertising,"  writes  Lord  Grey  to  the 
Queen,  "  I  would  have  had  every  day  to  have  troubled  your  High- 
ness."   Yet  Lord  Grey  protests  in  the  same  letter  that  he  has  never 
taken  the  life  of  any,  however  evil,  who  submitted.    At  the  end  of 
the  Desmond  outbreak,  the  chiefs  in  the  different  provinces  send 
in  their  tale  of  death.    Ormond  complains  of  the  false  reports  of 
his  "  slackness  in  but  killing  three  men,"  whereas  the  number  was 
more  than  3000 ;  and  he  sends  in  his  "  brief  note  "  of  his  contribu- 
tion to  the  slaughter,  "  598  persons  of  quality,  besides  3000  or4ooQ 
others,  and  158  slain  since  his  discharge."    The  end  was  that,  aa 


one  of  the  cliief  actors  writes,  Sir  Warham  St.  Leger,  "Munster 
is  nearly  unpeopled  by  the  murders  done  by  the  rebels,  and  the 
killings  by  the  soldiers  ;  30,000  dead  of  famine  in  half  a  year,  be- 
sides numbers  that  are  hanged  and  killed.  The  realm,"  he  adds, 
*'was  never  in  greater  danger,  or  in  like  misery."  But  in  the  mur- 
derous work  itself  there  was  not  much  danger.  Our  wars,"  writes 
Sir  Henry  Wallop,  in  the  height  of  the  struggle,  *'are  but  like  fox- 
hunting.'* And  when  the  English  Government  remonstrates 
i-: gainst  this  system  of  massacre,  the  Lord-Deputy  writes  back  that 
he  sorrows  that  pity  for  the  wicked  and  evil  should  be  enchanted 
into  her  Majesty." 

And  of  this  dreadful  policy,  involving,  as  the  price  of  the  ex- 
tinction of  Desmond's  rebellion,  the  absolute  desolation  of  the 
South  and  West  of  Ireland,  Lord  Grey  came  to  be  the  deliberate 
and  unfaltering  champion.  His  administration  lasted  only  two 
years,  and  in  spite  of  his  natural  kindness  of  temper,  which  we  need 
not  doubt,  it  was,  from  the  supposed  necessities  of  his  position,  and 
the  unwavering  consent  of  all  English  opinions  round  him,  a  rule 
of  extermination.  No  scruple  ever  crossed  his  mind,  except  that 
he  had  not  been  sufficiently  uncompromising  in  putting  first  the  re- 
ligious aspect  of  the  quarrel.  "  If  Elizabeth  had  allowed  him," 
writes  Mr.  Froude,  he  would  have  now  made  a  Mahommedan 
conquest  of  the  whole  island,  and  offered  the  Irish  the  alternative 
of  the  Gospel  or  the  sword."  With  the  terrible  sincerity  of  a 
Puritan,  he  reproached  himself  that  he  had  allowed  even  the 
Queen's  commands  to  come  before  tlie  "one  article  of  looking  to 
God's  dear  service."  "  I  confess  my  sin,"  he  wrote  to  Walsingham, 
"  I  have  followed  man  too  much,"  and  he  saw  why  his  efforts  had 
been  in  vain.  "  Baal's  prophets  and  councillors  shall  prevail.  I 
see  it  is  so.  I  see  it  is  just.  I  see  it  past  help.  I  rest  despaired." 
His  policy  of  blood  and  devastation,  breaking  the  neck  of  Des- 
mond's rebellion,  but  failing  to  put  an  end  to  it,  became  at  length 
more  than  the  home  Government  could  bear;  and  with  mutual  dis- 
satisfaction he  was  recalled  before  his  work  was  done.  Among  the 
documents  relating  to  his  explanations  with  the  English  Govern- 
ment, is  one  of  which  this  is  the  abstract :  "  Declaration  (Dec. 
1583),  by  Arthur,  Lord  Grey  of  Wilton,  to  the  Queen,  showing  the 
state  of  Ireland  when  he  was  appointed  Deputy,  with  the  services 
of  his  government,  and  the  plight  he  left  it  in.  T485  chief  men  and 
gentlemen  slain,  not  accounting  those  of  meaner  sort,  nor  yet  ex- 
ecutions by  law,  and  killing  of  churles,  which  were  innumerable." 

This  was  the  world  into  which  Spenser  was  abruptly  thrown, 
and  in  which  he  was  henceforward  to  have  his  home.  He  first  be- 
came acquainted  with  it  as  Lord  Grey's  Secretary  in  the  Munster 
war.  He  himself  in  later  days,  with  ample  experience  and  knowl- 
edge, reviewed  the  whole  of  this  dreadful  history,  its  policy,  its  ne- 
cessities, its  results  :  and  no  more  instructive  document  has  come 
down  to  us  from  those  times.  But  his  descri])tion  of  the  way  in 
win'ch  the  plan  of  extermination  was  carried  out  in  Munster  before 
his  eyes  may  fittingly  form  a  supplement  to  the  language  on  the 
.spot  of  tiiose  responsible  for  it. 


SPENSER. 


49 


"  Eudox,  But  what,  then,  shall  be  the  conclusion  of  this  war  ?  .  .  . 

"  Iren,  The  end  will  I  assure  me  be  very  short  and  much  sooner  than 
can  be,  in  so  great  a  trouble,  as  it  scemeth,  hoped  for,  although  there 
should  none  of  them  fall  by  the  sword  nor  be  slain  by  the  soldier  :  yet  thus 
being  kept  from  manurance  and  their  cattle  from  running  abroad,  by  this 
hard  restraint  they  would  quickly  consume  themselves,  and  devour  one 
another.  The  proof  whereof  I  sav/  sufficiently  exampled  in  these  late  wars 
of  Munster;  for  notwithstanding  that  the  same  was  a  most  rich  and  plen- 
tiful country,  full  of  corn  and  cattle  that  you  would  have  thought  they 
should  have  been  able  to  stand  long,  yet  ere  one  year  and  a  half  they  were 
brought  to  such  wretchedness  as  that  any  stony  heart  would  have  rued  the 
same.  Out  of  every  corner  of  the  woods  and  glynnes  they  came  creeping 
forth  upon  their  hands,  for  their  legs  could  not  bear  them  ;  they  looked  like 
anatomies  of  death,  they  spake  like  ghosts  crying  out  of  their  graves;  they 
did  eat  the  dead  carrions,  happy  where  they  could  find  them,  yea  and  one 
another  soon  after,  insomuch  that  the  very  carcases  they  spared  not  to 
scrape  out  of  their  graves  ;  and  if  they  found  a  plot  of  watercresses  or 
shamrocks,  there  they  flocked  as  to  a  feast  for  a  time,  yet  not  able  long  to 
continue  there  withal ;  that  in  a  short  space  there  were  none  almost  left, 
and  a  most  populous  and  plentiful  country  suddenly  left  void  of  man  and 
beast  ;  yet  sure  in  all  that  war  there  perished  not  many  by  the  sword,  but 
all  by  the  extremity  of  famine  which  they  themselves  had  wrought." 

It  is  hardly  surprising  that  Lord  Grey's  Secretary  should  share 
the  opinions  and  the  feelings  of  his  master  and  patroHo  Certainly 
in  his  company  and  service,  Spenser  learned  to  look  upon  Ireland 
and  the  Irish  with  the  impatience  and  loathing  which  filled  most 
Englishmen  ;  and  it  must  be  added  with  the  same  greedy  eyes.  In 
this  new  atmosphere,  in  which  his  life  was  henceforth  spent,  amid 
the  daily  talk  of  ravage  and  death,  the  daily  scramble  for  the  spoils 
of  rebels  and  traitors,  the  daily  alarms  of  treachery  and  insurrec- 
tion, a  man  naturally  learns  hardness.  Under  Spenser's  imagina- 
tive richness,  and  poetic  delicacy  of  feeling,  there  appeared  two 
features.  There  was  a  shrewd  sense  of  the  practical  side  of  things  : 
and  there  was  a  full  share  of  that  sternness  of  temper  which  be- 
longed to  the  time.  He  came  to  Ireland  for  no  romantic  purpose ; 
be  came  to  make  his  fortune  as  well  as  he  could  :  and  he  accepted 
the  conditions  of  the  place  and  scene,  and  entered  at  once  into  the 
game  of  adventure  and  gain  which  was  the  natural  one  for  all  Eng- 
lish comers,  and  of  which  the  prizes  were  lucrative  offices  and  for- 
feited manors  and  abbeys.  And  in  the  native  population  and 
native  interests,  he  saw  nothing  but  v/hat  called  forth  not  merely 
antipathy,  but  deep  moral  condemnation.  It  was  not  merely  that 
the  Irish  were  ignorant,  thriftless,  filthy,  debased,  and  loathsome  in 
their  pitiable  misery  and  despair  :  it  was  that  in  his  view,  justice, 
truth,  honesty  had  utterly  perished  among  them,  and  therefore 
were  not  due  to  them.  Of  any  other  side  to  the  picture  lie,  like 
other  good  Englishmen,  was  entirely  unconscious  :  he  saw  only  on 
all  sides  of  him  the  empire  of  barbarism  and  misrule  which  valiant 
and  godly  Englishmen  were  fighting  to  vanquish  and  destroy — fight- 
ing against  apparent  but  not  real  odds.  And  all  this  was  aggravated 
by  the  stiff  adherence  of  the  Irish  to  their  old  religion.  "  Spenser 

4 


Si'ENSER. 


came  over  with  the  common  opinion  of  Protestant  Englishmen,  that 
they  had  ai  least  in  England  the  pure  and  undoubted  religion  of 
the  Bible  :  and  in  Ireland,  he  found  himself  face  to  face  with  the 
very  superstition  in  its  lowest  forms  which  he  had  so  hated  in  Eng- 
land. He  left  it  plotting  in  England  ;  he  found  it  in  armed  rebel- 
lion in  Ireland.  Like  Lord  Grey,  he  saw  in  Popery  the  root  of  all 
the  mischiefs  of  Ireland  :  and  his  sense  of  true  religion,  as  well  as 
his  convictions  of  right,  conspired  to  recommend  to  him  Lord 
Grey's  pitiless  government.  The  opinion  was  everywhere — it  was 
undisputed  and  unexamined — that  a  policy  of  force,  direct  or  indi- 
rect, was  the  natural  and  right  way  of  reducing  diverging  religions 
to  submission  and  uniformity:  that  religious  disagreement  ought  as 
a  matter  of  principle  to  be  subdued  by  violence  of  one  degree  or 
another.  All  wise  and  good  men  thought  so ;  all  statesmen  and 
rulers  acted  so.  Spenser  found  in  Ireland  a  state  of  things  which 
seemed  to  make  this  doctrine  the  simplest  dictate  of  common 
sense. 

In  August,  1 582,  Lord  Grey  left  Ireland.  He  had  accepted  his 
office  with  the  utmost  reluctance,  from  the  known  want  of  agree- 
ment between  the  Queen  and  himself  as  to  policy.  He  had  exe- 
cuted it  in  a  way  which  greatly  displeased  the  home  Government. 
And  he  gave  it  up,  with  his  special  work,  the  extinction  of  Des- 
mond's rebellion,  still  unaccomplished.  In  spite  of  the  thousands 
slain,  and  a  province  made  a  desert,  Desmond  was  still  at  large 
and  dangerous.  Lord  Grey  had  been  ruthlessly  severe,  and  yet 
not  successful.  For  months  there  had  been  an  interchange  of  angry 
letters  between  him  and  the  Government.  Burghley,  he  complains 
to  Walsingham,  was  "so  heavy  against  him."  The  Queen  and 
Burghley  wanted  order  restored,  but  did  not  like  either  the  expense 
of  war,  or  the  responsibility  before  other  governments  for  the  se- 
verity which  their  agents  on  the  spot  judged  necessary.  Knowing 
that  he  did  not  please,  he  had  begun  to  solicit  his  recall  before  he 
had  been  a  year  in  Ireland  ;  and  at  length  he  was  recalled,  not  to 
receive  thanks,  but  to  meet  a  strict,  if  not  hostile,  inquiry  into  his 
administration.  Besides  what  had  been  on  the  surface  of  his  pro- 
ceedings to  dissatisfy  the  Queen,  there  had  been,  as  in  the  case  of 
every  Deputy,  a  continued  underground  stream  of  backbiting  and 
insinuation  going  home  against  him.  Spenser  did  not  forget  this, 
when  in  the  Faerie  Queeiie  he  shadowed  forth  Lord  Grey's  career 
in  the  adventures  of  Arthegal,  the  great  Knight  of  Justice,  met  on 
his  return  home  from  his  triumphs  by  the  hags,  Envy  and  Detrac- 
tion, and  the  braying  of  the  hundred  tongues  of  the  Blatant  Beast. 
Irish  lords  and  partisans,  calling  themselves  loyal,  when  they  could 
not  get  what  they  wanted,  or  w^hen  he  threatened  them  for  their 
insincerity  or  insolence,  at  once  wrote  to  England.  His  English 
colleagues,  civil  and  military,  were  his  natural  rivals  or  enemies, 
ever  on  the  watch  to  spy  out  and  report,  if  necessary,  to  misrepre- 
sent, what  was  questionable  or  unfortunate  in  his  proceedings. 
Permanent  officials  like  Archbishop  Adam  Loftus  the  Chancellor, 
or  Treasurer  Wallop,  or  Secretary  Fenton,  knew  more  than  he  did  ; 


SPENSER. 


SI 


they  corresponded  directly  with  the  ministers  ;  they  knew  that  they 
were  expected  to  keep  a  strict  watch  on  his  expenditure  ;  and  they 
had  no  scruple  to  send  home  complaints  against  liim  behind  his 
back,  as  they  did  against  one  another.  A  secretary  in  Dublin  like 
Geoffrey  Ponton  is  described  as  a  moth  in  the  garment  of  every 
Deputy.  Grey  himself  complains  of  the  underhand  work  ;  he  can- 
not prevent  "  backbiters'  report :  "  he  has  found  of  late  "  very  sus- 
picious dealing  amongst  all  his  best  esteemed  associates  ;  "  he 
"  dislikes  not  to  be  informed  of  the  charges  against  him."  In  fact, 
they  were  accusing  him  of  one  of  the  gravest  sins  of  which  a  Dep- 
uty could  be  guilty;  they  were  writing  home  that  he  was  lavishing 
the  forfeited  estates  among  his  favourites,  under  pretence  of  re- 
warding service,  to  the  great  loss  and  permanent  damage  of  her 
Majesty's  revenue  ;  and  they  were  forwarding  plans  for  commis- 
sions to  distribute  these  estates,  of  which  the  Deputy  should  not 
be  a  member. 

He  had  the  common  fate  of  those  who  accepted  great  responsibil- 
ities under  the  Queen.  He  was  expected  to  do  very  hard  tasks 
with  insufficient  means,  and  to  receive  more  blame  where  he  failed 
than  thanks  where  he  succeeded.  He  had  every  one,  English  and 
Irish,  against  him  in  Ireland,  and  no  one  for  him  in  England.  He 
was  driven  to  violence  because  he  wanted  strength  ;  he  took  lib- 
erties with  forfeitures  belonging  to  the  Queen  because  he  had  no 
other  means  of  rewarding  public  services.  It  is  not  easy  to  feel 
much  sympathy  for  a  man  who,  brave  and  public-spirited  as  he 
was,  could  think  of  no  remedy  for  the  miseries  of  Ireland  but 
wholesale  bloodshed.  Yet,  compared  with  the  resident  officials 
who  caballed  against  him,  and  who  got  rich  on  these  miseries,  the 
Wallops  and  Fentons  of  the  Irish  Council,  this  stern  Puritan,  so 
remorseless  in  what  he  beheved  to  be  his  duty  to  his  Queen  and 
his  faith,  stands  out  as  an  honest  and  faithful  public  servant  of  a 
Government  which  seemed  hardly  to  know  its  own  mind,  which 
vacillated  between  indulgence  and  severity,  and  which  hampered 
its  officers  by  contradictory  policies,  ignorant  of  their  difficulties, 
and  incapable  of  controlling  the  supplies  for  a  costly  and  wasteful 
war.  Lord  Grey's  strong  hand,  though  incapable  of  reaching  the 
real  causes  of  Irish  evils,  undoubtedly  saved  the  country  at  a 
moment  of  serious  peril,  and  once  more  taught  lawless  Geraldines, 
and  Eustaces,  and  Burkes  the  terrible  lesson  of  English  power. 
The  work  which  he  had  half  done  in  crushing  Desmond  was  soon 
finished  by  Desmond's  hereditary  rival,  Ormond  ;  and  under  the 
milder,  but  not  more  popular,  rule  of  his  successor,  the  proud  and 
irritable  Sir  John  Perrot,  Ireland  had  for  a  few  years  the  peace 
which  consisted  in  the  absence  of  a  definite  rebellion,  till  Tyrone 
began  to  stir  in  1 595,  and  Perrot  went  back  a  disgraced  man,  to 
die  a  prisoner  in  the  Tower. 

Lord  Grey  left  behind  him  unappeasable  animosities,  and  re- 
turned to  meet  jealous  rivals  and  an  ill-satisfied  mistress.  But  he 
had  left  behind  one  whose  admiration  and  reverence  he  had  won, 
and  who  was  not  afraid  to  take  care  of  his  reputation.  Vv^hether 


52 


SPENSER. 


Spenser  went  back  with  his  patron  or  not  in  1 582,  he  was  from 
henceforth  mainly  resident  in  Ireland.  Lord  Grey's  administration, 
and  the  principles  on  which  it  had  been  carried  on,  had  made  a 
deep  impression  on  Spenser's  mind.  His  first  ideal  had  been 
Philip  Sidney,  the  attractive  and  ail-accomplished  gentleman — 

The  President 
Of  noblesse  and  of  chevalrie/' — 

and  to  the  end  the  pastoral  Colin  Clout,  for  he  ever  retained  his  first 
poetic  name,  was  faithful  to  his  ideal.  But  in  the  stern  Proconsul, 
under  whom  he  had  become  hardened  into  a  keen  and  resolute 
colonist,  he  had  come  in  contact  with  a  new  type  of  character ;  a 
governor,  under  the  sense  of  duty,  doing  the  roughest  of  work  in  the 
roughest  of  ways.  In  Lord  Grey,  he  had  this  character,  not  as  he 
might  read  of  it  in  books,  but  acting  out  its  qualities  in  present  life, 
amid  the  unexpected  emergencies,  the  desperate  alternatives,  the 
calls  for  instant  decision,  the  pressing  necessities  and  the  anxious 
hazards,  of  a  course  full  of  uncertainty  and  peril.  He  had  before 
his  eyes,  day  by  day,  fearless,  unshrinking  determination,  in  a 
hateful  and  most  unpromising  task.  He  believed  that  he  saw  a 
living  example  of  strength,  manliness,  and  nobleness ;  of  unspar- 
ing and  unswerving  zeal  for  order  and  religion,  and  good  govern- 
ment ;  of  single-hearted  devotion  to  truth  and  right,  and  to  the 
Queen.  Lord  Grey  grew  at  last,  in  the  poet's  imagination,  into  the 
image  and  representative  of  perfect  and  masculine  justice.  When 
Spenser  began  to  enshrine  in  a  great  allegory  his  ideas  of  human 
life  and  character.  Lord  Grey  supplied  the  moral  features,  and 
almost  the  name,  of  one  of  its  chief  heroes.  Spenser  did  more 
than  embody  his  memory  in  poeitcal  allegories.  In  Spenser's 
View  of  the  present  State  of  Ireland^  written  some  years  after 
Lord  Grey's  death,  he  gives  his  mature,  and  then,  at  any  rate, 
disinterested  approbation  of  Lord  Grey's  administration,  and  his 
opinion  of  the  causes  of  its  failure.  He  kindles  into  indignation 
when  ^Mnost  untruely  and  maliciously,  those  evil  tongues  backbite 
and  slander  the  sacred  ashes  of  that  most  just  and  honourable 
personage,  whose  least  virtue,  of  many  most  excellent,  which 
abounded  in  his  heroical  spirit,  they  were  never  able  to  aspire 
unto." 

Lord  Grey's  patronage  had  brought  Spenser  into  the  public 
service  ;  perhaps  that  patronage,  the  patronage  of  a  man  who  had 
powerful  enemies,  was  the  cause  that  Spenser's  preferments,  after 
Lord  Grey's  recall,  were  on  so  moderate  a  scale.  The  notices 
which  we  glean  from  indirect  sources  about  Spenser's  employment 
in  Ireland  are  meagre  enough,  but  they  are  distinct.  They  show 
him  as  a  subordinate  public  servant,  of  no  great  account,  but  yet, 
like  other  public  servants  in  Ireland,  profiting,  in  his  degree,  by 
the  opportunities  of  the  time.  In  the  spring  following  Lord  Grey's 
arrival  (March  22,  1581),  Spenser  was  appointed  Clerk  of  Decrees 
and  Recognizances  in  the  Irish  Court  of  Chancery,  retaining  his 


S3 


place  as  Secretary  to  the  Lord-Deputy,  in  which  character  his 
signature  sometirnes  appears  in  the  Irish  Records,  certifying 
State  documents  sent  to  England.  This  office  is  said  by  Fuller 
to  have  been  a  "  lucrative  one.  In  the  same  year  he  received 
a  lease  of  the  Abbey  and  Manor  of  Enniscorthy,  in  the  County  of 
Wexford.  Enniscorthy  was  an  important  post  in  the  network  of 
English  garrisons,  on  one  of  the  roads  from  Dublin  to  the  South. 
He  held  it  but  for  a  short  time.  It  was  transferred  by  him  to  a 
citizen  of  Wexford,  Richard  Synot,  an  agent,  apparently,  of  the 
powerful  Sir  Henry  Wallop,  the  Treasurer ;  and  it  was  soon  after 
transferred  by  Synot  to  his  patron,  an  official  who  secured  to 
himself  a  large  share  of  the  spoils  of  Desmond's  rebellion.  Fur- 
ther, Spenser's  name  appears,  in  a  list  of  persons  (January,  1 582), 
among  whom  Lord  Grey  had  distributed  some  of  the  forfeited 
property  of  the  rebels — a  list  sent  home  by  him  in  answer  to 
charges  of  waste  and  damage  to  the  Queen's  revenue,  busily  urged 
against  him  in  Ireland  by  men  like  Wallop  and  Fenton,  and  readily 
listened  to  by  English  ministers  like  Burghley,  who  complained 
that  Ireland  was  a  gulf  of  consuming  treasure.'-  The  grant  was 
mostly  to  persons  active  in  service,  among  others  one  to  Wallop 
himself ;  and  a  certain  number  of  smaller  value  to  persons  of  Lord 
Grey's  own  household.  There,  among  yeomen  ushers,  gentlemen 
ushers,  gentlemen  serving  the  Lord-l3eputy,  and  Welshmen  and 
Irishmen  with  uncouth  names,  to  whom  small  gratifications  had 
been  allotted  out  of  the  spoil,  we  read — "  the  lease  of  a  house  in 
Dublin  belonging  to  [Lord]  Baltinglas  for  six  years  to  come  to 
Edmund  Spenser,  one  of  the  Lord-Deputy's  Secretaries,  valued  at 
5/."  .  .  .  "  of  a  ^  custodiam '  of  John  Eustace's  [one  of  Baltinglas' 
family]  land  of  the  Newland  to  Edmund  Spenser,  one  of  the  Lord- 
Deputy's  Secretaries."  In  July,  1586,  when  every  one  was  full  of 
the  project  for  "  planting  "  Munster,  he  was  still  in  Dublin,  for  he 
addresses  from  thence  a  sonnet  to  Gabriel  Harvey.  In  March, 
158I,  we  find  the  following  in  a  list  of  officers  on  the  establishment 
of  the  province  of  Munster,  which  the  government  was  endeavour- 
ing to  colonise  from  the  west  of  England :  "  Lodovick  Briskett, 
clerk  to  the  council  (at  20/.  per  annum),  13/.  6^".  8d.  (this  is  exercised 
by  one  Spenser,  as  deputy  for  the  said  Briskett,  to  whom  (/.  e.y 
Briskett)  it  was  granted  by  patent  6  Nov.  25  Eliz.  (1583)."  {Cai'cw 
MSS.)  Bryskett  was  a  man  much  employed  in  Irish  business. 
He  had  been  Clerk  to  the  Irish  Council,  had  been  a  correspondent 
of  Burghley  and  Walsingham,  and  had  aspired  to  be  Secretary  of 
State  when  Fenton  obtained  the  poet :  possibly  in  disappointment, 
he  had  retired,  with  an  office  which  he  exercised  by  deputy,  to  his 
lands  in  Wexford.  He  was  a  poet,  and  a  friend  of  Spenser's  ; 
and  it  may  have  been  by  his  interest  with  the  dispensers  of  patron- 
age, that  "  one  Spenser/'  who  had  been  his  deputy,  succeeded  to 
his  office. 

In  this  position  Spenser  was  brought  into  communication  with 
the  powerful  English  chiefs  on  the  Council  of  Munster,  and  also 
with  the  leading  men  among  the  Undertakers,  as  they  were  called, 


54 


SPENSER, 


among  whom  more  than  half  a  million  of  acres  of  the  escheated  and 
desolate  lands  of  the  fallen  Desmond  were  to  be  divided,  on  condi- 
tion of  each  Undertaker  settling  on  his  estate  a  proportionate  num- 
ber of  English  gentlemen,  yeomen,  artisans,  and  labourers  with  their 
families,  who  were  to  bring  the  ruined  province  into  order  and 
cultivation.  The  President  and  Vice-President  of  the  Council 
were  the  two  Norreys,  John  and  Thomas,  two  of  the  most  gallant 
of  a  gallant  family.  The  project  for  the  planting  of  Munster  had 
been  originally  started  before  the  rebellion,  in  1568.  It  had  been 
one  of  the  causes  of  the  rebellion ;  but  now  that  Desmond  was 
fallen,  it  was  revived.  It  had  been  received  in  England  with  favour 
and  hope.  Men  of  influence  and  enterprise,  Sir  Christopher  Hatton, 
Walsingham,  Walter  Raleigh,  had  embarked  in  it ;  and  the  govern- 
ment had  made  an  appeal  to  the  English  country  gentlemen  to  take 
advantage  of  this  new  opening  for  their  younger  sons,  and  to  send 
them  over  at  the  head  of  colonies  from  the  families  of  their  tenants 
and  dependants,  to  occupy  a  rich  and  beautiful  land  on  easy  terms 
of  rent.  In  the  Western  Counties,  north  and  south,  the  appeal  had 
awakened  interest.  In  the  list  of  Undertakers  are  found  Cheshire 
and  Lancashire  names — Stanley,  Fleetwood,  Molyneux  :  and  a  still 
larger  number  for  Somerset,  Devon,  and  Dorset — Popham,  Rogers, 
Coles,  Raleigh,  Chudleigh,  Champernown.  The  plan  of  settlement 
was  carefully  and  methodically  traced  out.  The  province  was  sur- 
veyed as  well  as  it  could  be  under  great  difficulties.  Maps  were 
made  which  Lord  Burghley  annotated.  "  Seigniories  "  were  created 
of  varying  size,  12,000,  8000,  6000,  4000  acres,  with  corresponding 
obligations  as  to  the  number  and  class  of  farms  and  inhabitants  in 
each.  Legal  science  in  England  was  to  protect  titles  by  lengthy 
patents  and  leases  ;  administrative  watchfulness  and  firmness  were 
to  secure  them  in  Ireland.  Privileges  of  trade  were  granted  to  the 
Undertakers  :  they  were  even  allowed  to  transport  coin  out  of  Eng- 
land to  Ireland:  and  a  long  respite  was  granted  them  before  the 
Crown  was  to  claim  its  rents.  Strict  rules  were  laid  down  to  keep 
the  native  Irish  out  of  the  Enghsh  lands  and  from  intermarrying  with 
the  English  families.  In  this  partition,  Seigniories  were  distributed 
by  the  Undertakers  among  themselves  with  the  free  carelessness 
of  men  dividing  the  spoil.  The  great  people,  like  Hatton  and 
Raleigh,  were  to  have  their  two  or  three  Seigniories  :  the  County 
of  Cork,  with  its  nineteen  Seigniories,  is  assigned  to  the  gentlemen 
undertakers  from  Somersetshire.  The  plan  was  an  ambitious  and 
tempting  one.  But  difficulties  soon  arose.  The  gentlemen  under- 
takers were  not  in  a  hurry  to  leave  En^^land,  even  on  a  visit  to  their 
desolate  and  dangerous  seigniories  in  Munster.  The  "  planting  "  did 
not  thrive.  The  Irish  were  inexhaustible  in  raising  legal  obstacles 
and  in  giving  practical  annoyance.  Claims  and  titles  were  hard  to 
discover  or  to  extinguish.  Even  the  very  attainted  and  escheated 
lands  were  cliallenged  by  virtue  of  settlements  made  before  the 
attainders.  The  result  was  that  a  certain  number  of  Irish  estater- 
were  added  to  the  possessions  of  a  certain  number  of  English 
families.    But  Munster  v/as  not  planted.    Burghley's  policy,  and 


SPE.VSER. 


SS 


Walsingham's  resolution,  and  Raleigh's  daring  inventiveness  were 
alike  baffled  by  the  conditions  of  a  problem  harder  tlian  the  peopling 
of  America  or  the  conquest  of  India.  Munster  could  not  be  made 
English.  After  all  its  desolation,  it  reverted  in  the  main  to  its  Irish 
possessors. 

Of  all  the  schemes  and  efforts  which  accompanied  the  attempt, 
and  the  records  of  which  fill  the  Irish  State  papers  of  those  years, 
Spenser  was  the  near  and  close  spectator.  He  was  in  Dublin  and 
on  the  spot,  as  Clerk  of  the  Council  of  Munster.  And  he  had  become 
acquainted,  perhaps,  by  this  time,  had  formed  a  friendship,  with 
Walter  Raleigh,  one  of  the  most  active  men  in  Irish  business, 
whose  influence  was  rising  wherever  he  was  becoming  known. 
Most  of  the  knowledge  which  Spenser  thus  gathered,  and  of  the  im- 
pressions which  a  practical  handling  of  Irish  affairs  had  left  on  him, 
was  embodied  in  his  interesting  work,  written  several  years  later — A 
View  of  the  present  State  of  Irelaiid,  But  his  connexion  with 
Munster  not  unnaturally  brought  him  also  an  accession  of  fortune. 
When  Ralegh  and  the  "  Somersetshire  men  were  dividing  among 
them  the  County  of  Cork,  the  Clerk  of  the  Council  was  remembered 
by  some  of  his  friends.  He  was  admitted  among  the  Undertakers. 
His  name  appears  in  the  list,  among  great  statesmen  and  captains 
with  their  seignories  of  1 2,000  acres,  as  holding  a  grant  of  some  3000. 
It  was  the  manor  and  castle  of  Kilcolman,  a  ruined  house  of  the 
Desmonds,  under  the  Galtee  Hills.  It  appears  to  have  been  first 
assigned  to  another  person.*  But  it  came  at  last  into  Spenser's 
hands,  probably  in  1586;  and  henceforward  this  was  his  abode  and 
his  home. 

Kilcolman  Castle  was  near  the  high-road  between  Mallow  and 
Limerick,  about  three  miles  from  Buttevant  and  Doneraile,  in  a 
plain  at  the  foot  of  the  last  w^estern  falls  of  the  Galtee  range,watered 
by  a  stream  now  called  the  Awbeg,  but  which  he  celebrates  under 
the  name  of  the  Mulla.  In  Spenser's  time  it  was  probably  sur- 
rounded with  woods.  The  earher  writers  describe  it  as  a  pleasant 
abode  with  fine  views,  and  so  Spenser  celebrated  its  natural  beau- 
ties. The  more  recent  accounts  are  not  so  favourable.  Kilcol- 
man," says  the  writer  in  Murray's  Handbook,  "  is  a  small  peel 
tower,  with  cramped  and  dark  rooms,  a  form  \yhich  every  gentle- 
man's house  assumed  in  turbulent  times.  It  is  situated  on  the 
margin  of  a  small  lake,  and,  it  must  be  confessed,  overlooking  an 
extremely  dreary  tract  of  country."  It  was  in  the  immediate  neigh- 
borhood of  the  wild  country  to  the  north,  half  forest,  half  bog,  the 
wood  and  hill  of  Aharlo,  or  Arlo,  as  Spenser  writes  it,  which  was  the 
refuge  and  the  "  great  fastness  "  of  the  Desmond  rebellion.  It 
was  amid  such  scenes,  amid  such  occupations,  in  such  society  and 
companionship,  that  the  poet  of  the  Fae^'ie  Qiceene  accomplished  as 
much  of  his  work  as  was  given  him  to  do.  In  one  of  his  later 
poems,  he  thus  contrasts  the  peace  of  England  with  his  own  home  ; 

*  CarewMSS.  Calendar,  1587,  p.  449.    Cf.  Irish  Papers  ;  Calendar,  1587,  p.  309,  450. 


S6 


SPENSER. 


"  No  wayling  there  nor  wretchednesse  is  heard, 
No  bloodie  issues  nor  no  leprosies, 
No  griesly  famine,  nor  no  raging  sweard. 
No  nightly  bordrags  [=border  ravage],  nor  no  hue  and  cries 
The  shepheards  there  abroad  may  safely  lie, 
On  hills  and  downes,  withouten  dread  or  daunger : 
No  ravenous  wolves  the  good  mans  hope  destroy^ 
Nor  outlawes  fell  affray  the  forest  raunger." 


SI 


CHAPTER  IV. 

THE  FAERIE  QUEENE — THE  FIRST  PART. 
[1580— 1590-] 

The  Faerie  Queene  is  heard  of  very  early  in  Spenser's  literary 
course.  We  know  that  in  the  beginning  of  1580,  the  year  in  which 
Spenser  went  to  Ireland,  something  under  that  title  had  been 
already  begun  and  submitted  to  Gabriel  Harvey's  judgment ;  and 
that,  among  other  literary  projects,  Spenser  was  intending  to  pro- 
ceed with  it.  But  beyond  the  mere  name,  we  know  nothing,  at 
this  time,  of  Spenser's  proposed  Faerie  Queene.  Harvey's  criti- 
cisms on  it  tell  us  nothing  of  its  general  plan  or  its  numbers. 
Whether  the  first  sketch  had  been  decided  upon,  whether  the  new 
stanza,  Spenser's  original  creation,  and  its  peculiar  beauty  and  in- 
strument, had  yet  been  invented  by  him,  while  he  had  been  trying 
experiments  in  metre  in  the  Shepherd' s  Calendar^  we  have  no 
means  of  determining.  But  he  took  the  idea  with  him  to  Ireland  ; 
and  in  Ireland  he  pursued  it  and  carried  it  out. 

The  first  authentic  account  which  we  have  of  the  composition 
of  the  Fae?ie  Queejie  is  in  a  pamphlet  written  by  Spenser's  friend 
and  predecessor  in  the  service  of  the  Council  of  Munster,  Ludowick 
Bryskett,  and  inscribed  to  Lord  Grey  of  Wilton  :  a  Discourse  of 
Civil  Life,  published  in  1606.  He  describes  a  meeting  of  friends 
at  his  cottage  near  Dublin,  and  a  conversation  that  took  place  on 
the  *^  ethical  "  part  of  moral  philosophy.  The  company  consisted 
of  some  of  the  principal  Englishmen  employed  in  Irish  affairs,  men 
whose  names  occur  continually  in  the  copious  correspondence  in 
the  Rolls  and  at  Lambeth.  There  was  Long,  the  Primate  of  Ar- 
magh ;  there  were  Sir  Robert  Dillon,  the  Chief  Justice  of  the 
Common  Pleas,  and  Dormer,  the  Queen's  Solicitor ;  and  there 
were  soldiers,  like  Thomas  Norreys,  then  Vice-President  of  Mun- 
ster, under  his  brother,  John  Norreys  ;  Sir  Warham  Sentleger,  on 
whom  had  fallen  so  much  of  the  work  in  the  South  of  Ireland,  and 
who  at  last,  like  Thomas  Norreys,  fell  in  Tyrone's  rebellion  ;  Cap- 
tain Christopher  Carleil,  Walsingham's  son-in-law,  a  man  who  had 
gained  great  distinction  on  land  and  sea,  not  only  in  Ireland,  but 
in  the  Low  Countries,  in  France,  and  at  Carthagena  and  San  Do* 
mingo  ;  and  Captain  Nicholas  Dawtry,  the  Seneschal  of  Clandeboy 


in  the  troublesome  Ulster  countr}^,  afterwards  "  Captain  "  of  Hamp» 
shire  at  the  time  of  the  Armada.  It  was  a  remarkable  party.  The 
date  of  this  meeting  must  have  been  after  the  summer  of  1584,  at 
which  time  Long  was  made  Primate,  and  before  the  beginning  of 
1588,  when  Dawtry  was  in  Hampshire.  The  extract  is  so  curious,  as 
a  picture  of  the  intellectual  and  literary  wants  and  efforts  of  the 
times,  especially  amid  the  disorders  of  Ireland,  and  as  a  statement 
of  Spenser's  purpose  in  his  poem,  that  an  extract  from  it  deserves 
to  be  inserted,  as  it  is  given  in  Mr.  Todd's  Lzye  of  Spenser^  and 
repeated  in  that  by  Mr.  Hales. 

"  Herein  do  I  greatly  envie,"  writes  Bryskett,  "  the  happiness  of  the 
Italians,  who  have  in  their  mother-tongue  late  writers  that  have,  with  a 
singular  easie  method  taught  all  that  Plato  and  Aristotle  have  confusedly 
or  obscurely  left  written.  Of  which,  some  I  have  begun  to  reade  with  no 
small  delight ;  as  Alexander  Piccolcmini,  Gio.  Baptista  Giraldi,  and 
Guazzo  ;  all  three  having  written  upon  the  Ethick  part  of  Morall  Philoso- 
phie  both  exactly  and  perspicuously.  And  would  God  that  some  of  our 
countrimen  would  shew  themselves  so  wel  affected  to  the  good  of  their 
countrie  (whereof  one  principall  and  most  important  part  consisteth  in 
the  instructing  men  to  vertue),  as  to  set  downe  in  English  the  precepts 
of  those  parts  of  Morall  Philosophic,  whereby  our  youth  might,  without 
spending  so  much  time  as  the  learning  of  tho?=e  other  languages  require, 
speedily  enter  into  the  right  course  of  vertuous  life. 

"  In  the  meane  while  I  must  struggle  with  those  bookes  which  I  vn- 
derstand  and  content  myself e  to  plod  upon  them,  in  hope  that  God  (who 
knoweth  the  sincerenesse  of  my  desire)  will  be  pleased  to  open  my  vnder- 
standing,  so  as  I  may  reape  that  profit  of  my  reading,  which  I  trauell  for. 
Yet  is  there  a  ge^itleinan  in  this  company^  whom  I  have  had  often  a  pur- 
pose to  intreate,  that  as  his  liesure  might  serue  him,  he  would  vouchsafe 
to  spend  some  time  with  me  to  instruct  me  in  some  hard  points  which  I 
cannot  of  myself e  vnderstand ;  knowing  him  to  be  not  ondy  perfect  in  the 
Greek  tongue^  but  also  very  well  read  in  Philosophie,  both  morall  and  natu- 
rall,  Neuertheless  such  is  my  bashfulness,  as  I  neuer  yet  durst  open  my 
mouth  to  disclose  this  miy  desire  unto  him,  though  I  have  not  wanted 
some  hartning  thereunto  from  himselfe.  For  of  loue  and  kindnes  to  me, 
he  encouraged  me  long  sithens  to follozv  the  reading  of  the  Greeke  tongue^ 
ajtd  offered  me  his  helpe  to  make  me  vnderstand  it.  But  now  that  so  good 
an  opportunitie  is  offered  vnto  me,  to  satisfie  in  some  sort  my  desire  ;  I 
thinke  I  should  commit  a  great  fault,  not  to  myselfe  alone,  but  to  all  this 
company,  if  I  should  not  enter  my  request  thus  farre,  as  to  moue  him  to 
spend  this  time  which  we  have  now  destined  to  familiar  discourse  and 
conuersation,  in  declaring  unto  us  the  great  benefits  which  men  obtaine 
by  the  knowledge  of  Morall  Philosophic,  and  in  making  us  to  know  what 
the  same  is,  what  be  the  parts  thereof,  whereby  vertues  are  to  be  distin- 
guished from  vices  ;  and  finally,  that  he  will  be  pleased  to  run  ouer  in  such 
order  as  he  shall  thinke  good,  such  and  so  many  principles  and  rules 
thereof,  as  shall  serue  not  only  for  my  better  instruction,  but  also  for  the 
contentment  and  satisfaction  of  you  al.  For  I  nothing  doubt,  but  that 
euery  one  of  you  will  be  glad  to  heare  so  profitable  a  discourse  and  thinke 
the  time  very  wel  spent  wherin  so  excellent  a  knowledge  shal  be  reuealed 
unto  you,  from  which  euery  one  may  be  assured  to  gather  some  fruit  as 
wel  as  myselfe. 

Therefore  (said  I),  turning  myselfe  to  AL  Spenser^  It  is  you,  sir,  to 


SPJSNSEK. 


59 


whom  it  pertaineth  to  shew  yourselfe  courteous  now  unto  vs  all  and  to 
make  vs  all  beholding  unto  you  for  the  pleasure  and  profit  which  we  shall 
gather  from  your  speeches,  if  you  shall  vouchsafe  to  open  unto  vs  the 
goodly  cabinet,  m  which  this  excellent  treasure  of  vertues  lieth  locked  up 
from  the  vulgar  sort.  And  thereof  in  the  behalf e  of  all  as  for  myself e,  I 
do  most  earnestly  intreate  you  not  to  say  vs  nay.  Vnto  which  wordes 
of  mine  euery  man  applauding  most  with  like  words  of  request,  and  the 
rest  with  gesture  and  countenances  expressing  as  much,  M,  Spmser  an- 
swered in  this  maner : 

"  *  Though  it  may  sceme  hard  for  me,  to  refuse  the  request  made  by 
you  all,  whom  euery  one  alone,  I  should  for  many  respects  be  willing  to 
gratifie  ;  yet  as  the  case  standeth,  I  doubt  not  but  with  the  consent  of  the 
most  part  of  you,  I  shall  be  excused  at  this  time  of  this  taske  which  would 
be  laid  vpon  me  ;  for  sure  I  am,  that  it  is  not  vnknowne  vnto  you,  that  I 
haue  al reedy  vndertaken  a  work  tending  to  the  same  effect,  which  is  in 
herotcal  verse  under  the  title  of  a  Faerie  Qiieene  to  represent  all  the  moral 
vertues,  assigning  to  euery  vertue  a  Knight  to  be  the  patron  and  defender 
of  the  same,  in  whose  actions  and  feates  of  arms  and  chiualry  the  opera- 
tions of  that  vertue,  whereof  he  is  the  protector,  are  to  be  expressed,  and 
the  vices  and  unruly  appetites  that  oppose  themselves  against  the  same, 
to  be  beaten  down  and  ouercome.  Which  work,  as  I  have  already  well 
enired  into^  if  God  shall  please  to  spare  me  life  that  I  may  finish  it  ac- 
cording to  my  mind,  your  wish  (M.  Bryskett)  will  be  in  some  sort  ac- 
complished, though  perhaps  not  so  effectually  as  you  could  desire.  And 
the  same  may  very  well  serue  for  my  excuse,  if  at  this  time  I  craue  to  be 
forborne  in  this  your  request,  since  any  discourse,  that  I  might  make  thus 
on  the  sudden  in  such  a  subject  would  be  but  simple,  and  little  to  your 
satisfactions.  For  it  would  require  good  aduisement  and  premeditation 
for  any  man  to  vndertake  the  declaration  of  these  points  that  you  have 
proposed,  containing  in  effect  the  Ethicke  part  of  Morall  Philosophie. 
Whereof  since  I  haue  taken  in  hand  to  discourse  at  large  in  my  poeme  be- 
fore spoken,  I  hope  the  expectation  of  that  work  may  serue  to  free  me  at 
this  time  from  speaking  in  that  matter,  notwithstanding  your  motion  and 
all  your  intreaties.  But  I  will  tell  you  how  I  thinke  by  himselfe  he  may 
very  well  excuse  my  speech,  and  yet  satisfie  all  3'ou  in  this  matter.  I  haue 
scene  (as  he  knoweth)  a  translation  made  by  himselfe  out  of  the  Italian 
tongue  of  a  dialogue  comprehending  all  the  Ethick  part  of  Moral  Philoso- 
phy written  by  one  of  those  three  he  formerly  mentioned,  and  that  is  by 
Giraldi  the  title  of  a  Dialogue  of  Ciuil  life.    If  it  please  him  to 

bring  us  forth  that  translation  to  be  here  read  among  vs,  or  otherwise  to 
deliuer  to  us,  as  his  memory  may  serue  him,  the  contents  of  the  same  ;  he 
shal  (I  warrant  you)  satisfie  you  all  at  the  ful,  and  himselfe  wil  haue  no 
cause  but  to  thinke  the  time  well  spent  in  reuicwing  his  labors,  especially 
in  the  company  of  so  many  his  friends,  who  may  thereby  reape  much  pro- 
fit, and  the  translation  happily  fare  the  better  by  some  mending  it  may 
rcceiue  in  the  perusing,  as  all  writings  else  may  do  by  the  often  examina- 
tion of  the  same.  Neither  let  it  trouble  him  that  I  so  turne  ouer  to 
him  againe  the  taske  he  would  haue  put  me  to;  for  it  falleth  out  fit  for 
him  to  verifie  the  principall  of  all  this  Apologie,  cuen  now  made  for  him- 
selfe ;  because  thereby  it  will  appeare  that  he  hath  not  withdrawne  him- 
selfe from  seruice  of  the  state  to  line  idle  or  wholly  priuate  to  himselfe, 
but  hath  spent  some  time  in  doing  that  which  may  greatly  benefit  others, 
and  hath  serued  not  a  little  to  the  bettering  of  his  owne  mind,  andincreas- 
inof  of  his  knowledge  ;  though  he  for  modesty  pretend  much  ignorance, 
and  pleadewant  in  wealth,  much  like  some  rich  beggars,  who  either  of  cus- 


6o 


SPENSER. 


torn,  or  fvor  couetousnes,  go  to  begge  of  others  those  things  whereof  they 
hauc  no  want  at  home.' 

"  With  this  answer  of  M.  Sfensers  it  seemed  that  all  the  company  were 
wel  satisfied,  for  after  some  few  speeches  whereby  they  had  shewed  an 
extreme  longing  after  his  worke  of  the  Fairig  Qiieene,  whereof  some  parcels 
had  been  by  some  of  them  seene,  they  all  began  to  presse  me  to  produce  my 
translation  mentioned  by  M.  Spenser  that  it  might  be  perused  among 
them ;  or  else  that  I  should  (as  near  as  I  could)  deliuer  unto  them  the 
contents  of  the  same,  supposing  that  my  memory  would  not  much  faile  me 
in  a  thing  so  studied  and  advisedly  set  downe  in  writing  as  a  translation 
must  be.'* 

A  poet  at  this  time  still  had  to  justify  his  employment  by  pre- 
senting himself  in  the  character  of  a  professed  teacher  of  morality, 
with  a  purpose  as  definite  and  formal,  though  with  a  different 
mythod,  as  the  preacher  in  the  pulpit.  Even  with  this  profession, 
he  had  to  encounter  many  prejudices,  and  men  of  gravity  and  wis- 
dom shook  their  heads  at  what  they  thought  his  idle  trifling.  But 
if  he  wished  to  be  counted  respectable,  and  to  separate  himself 
from  the  crowd  of  foolish  or  licentious  rimers,  he  must  intend  dis- 
tinctly, not  merely  to  interest,  but  to  instruct,  by  his  new  and  deep 
conceits.  It  was  under  the  influence  of  this  persuasion  that  Spen- 
ser laid  down  the  plan  of  the  Faerie  Queene,  It  was,  so  he  pro- 
posed to  himself,  to  be  a  work  on  moral,  and,  if  time  were  given 
him,  political  philosophy,  composed  with  as  serious  a  didactic  aim, 
as  any  treatise  or  sermon  in  prose.  He  deems  it  necessary  to  ex- 
plain and  excuse  his  work  by  claiming  for  it  this  design.  He  did 
uot  venture  to  send  the  Faerie  Qtieene  into  the  world  without  also 
telling  the  world  its  moral  meaning  and  bearing.  He  cannot  trust 
it  to  tell  its  own  story  or  suggest  its  real  drift.  In  the  letter  to  Sir 
W.  Raleigh,  accompanying  the  first  portion  of  it,  he  unfolds 
elaborately  in  the  sense  of  his  allegory,  as  he  expounded  it  to 
his  friends  in  Dublin.  "  To  some,"  he  says.  "  I  know  this  method 
will  seem  displeasant,  which  had  rather  have  good  discipline  de- 
livered plainly  by  way  of  precept,  or  sermoned  large,  as  they  use, 
than  ttius  cloudily  enwTapped  in  allegorical  devises.'*  He  thought 
that  Homer  and  Virgil  and  Ariosto  had  thus  written  poetry,  to 
teach  the  world  moral  virtue  and  political  wisdom.  He  attempted 
to  propitiate  Lord  Burghley,  who  hated  him  and  his  verses,  by 
setting  before  him  in  a  dedication  sonnet,  the  true  intent  of  his — 

"  Idle  rimes  ; 
The  labour  of  lost  time  and  wit  unstaid ; 
Yet  if  their  deeper  sense  he  inly  weighed, 
And  the  dim  veil,  with  which  from  common  view 
Their  fairer  parts  are  hid,  aside  be  laid, 
Perhaps  not  vain  they  may  appear  to  you." 

In  earlier  and  in  later  times,  men  do  not  apologise  for  being 
poets;  and  Spenser  himself  was  deceived  in.  giving  himself  credit 
for  this  direct  purpose  to  instruct,  when  he  was  really  following  the 


SPENSER. 


6i 


course  marked  out  by  his  genius.  But  he  only  conformed  to  the 
curious  utilitarian  spirit  which  pervaded  the  literature  of  the  time. 
Readers  were  supposed  to  look  everywhere  for  a  moral  to  be 
drawn,  or  a  lesson  to  be  inculcated,  or  some  practical  rules  to  be 
avowedly  and  definitely  deduced ;  and  they  could  not  yet  take  in 
the  idea  that  the  exercise  of  the  speculative  and  imaginative  facul- 
ties may  be  its  own  end,  and  may  have  indirect  influences  and 
utilities  even  greater  than  if  it  was  guided  by  a  conscious  inten- 
tion to  be  edifying  and  instructive. 

The  first  great  English  poem  of  modern  times,  the  first  creation 
of  English  imaginative  power  since  Chaucer,  and  like  Chaucer  so 
thoroughly  and  characteristically  English,  was  not  written  in  England. 
Whatever  Spenser  may  have  done  to  it  before  he  left  England  with 
Lord  Grey,  and  whatever  portions  of  earlier  composition  may  have 
been  used  and  worked  up  into  the  poem  as  it  went  on,  the  bulk  of 
the  Faerie  Queene,  as  we  have  it,  was  composed  in  what  to  Spenser 
and  his  friends  was  almost  a  foreign  land — in  the  conquered  and 
desolated  wastes  of  wild  and  barbarous  Ireland.  It  is  a  feature  of 
his  v/ork  on  which  Spenser  himself  dwells.  In  the  verses  which 
usher  in  his  poem,  addressed  to  the  great  men  of  Elizabeth's  court, 
he  presents  his  work  to  the  Earl  of  Ormond,  as 

"  The  wild  fruit  which  salvage  soil  hath  bred ; 
Which  being  through  long  wars  left  almost  waste, 
With  brutish  barbarism  is  overspread  ; " — 

and  in  the  same  strain  to  Lord  Grey,  he  speaks  of  his  "rude  rimes, 
the  which  a  rustic  muse  did  weave,  in  salvage  soil.'*  It  is  idle  to 
speculate  what  difference  of  form  the  Faerie  Queetie  might  have 
received,  if  the  design  had  been  carried  out  in  the  peace  of  Eng- 
land and  in  the  society  of  London.  But  it  is  certain  that  the 
scene  of  trouble  and  danger  in  which  it  grew  up  greatly  affected 
it.  This  may  possibly  account,  though  it  is  questionable,  for  the 
looseness  of  the  texture,  and  the  want  of  accuracy  and  finish 
which  is  sometimes  to  be  seen  in  it.  Spenser  was  a  learned  poet ; 
and  his  poem  has  the  character  of  the  work  of  a  man  of  wide  read- 
ing, but  without  books  to  verify  or  correct.  It  cannot  be  doubted 
that  his  life  in  Ireland  added  to  the  force  and  vividness  with 
which  Spenser  wrote.  In  Ireland,  he  had  before  his  eyes  contin- 
ually the  dreary  world  which  the  poet  of  knight-errantry  imagines. 
There  men  might  in  good  truth  travel  long  through  wildernesses 
and  "  great  woods  "  given  over  to  the  outlaw  and  the  ruffian.  There 
the  avenger  of  wrong  need  seldom  want  for  perilous  adventure  and 
the  occasion  for  quelling  the  oppressor.  There  the  armed  and  un- 
relenting hand  of  right  was  but  too  truly  the  only  substitute  for 
law.  There  might  be  found  in  most  certain  and  prosaic  reality,  the 
ambushes,  the  disguises,  the  treacheries,  the  deceits  and  temptations, 
even  the  supposed  witchcrafts  and  enchantments,  against  which 
the  fairy  champions  of  the  virtues  have  to  be  on  their  guard.  In 
Ireland,  Englishmen  saw,  or  at  any  rate  thought  they  saw,  a  uni- 
versal conspiracy  of  fraud  against  righteousness,  a  universal  battle 


62 


SPENSER. 


going  on  between  error  and  religion,  between  justice  and  the  most 
insolent  selfishness.  They  found  there  every  type  of  what  was 
cruel,  brutal,  loathsome.  They  saw  everywhere  men  whose  busi- 
ness it  was  to  betray  and  destroy,  women  whose  business  it  was 
to  tempt  and  ensnare  and  corrupt.  They  thought  that  they  saw 
too,  in  those  who  waged  the  Queen's  wars,  all  forms  of  manly  and 
devoted  gallantry,  of  noble  generosity,  of  gentle  strength,  of 
knightly  sweetness  and  courtesy.  There  were  those,  too,  who 
failed  in  the  hour  of  trial ;  who  were  the  victims  of  temptation  or 
of  the  victorious  strength  of  evil.  Besides  the  open  or  concealed 
traitors — the  Desmonds,  and  Kildares,  and  O'Neales — there  were 
the  men  who  were  entrapped  and  overcome,  and  the  men  who  dis- 
appointed hopes,  and  became  recreants  to  their  faith  and  loyalty ; 
like  Sir  William  Stanley,  who,  after  a  brilliant  career  in  Ireland, 
turned  traitor  and  apostate,  and  gave  up  Deventer  and  his  Irish 
bandi  to  the  King  of  Spain. 

The  realities  of  the  Irish  wars  and  of  Irish  social  and  political 
life  gave  a  real  subject,  gave  body  and  form  to  the  allegory.  There 
in  actual  flesh  and  blood  were  enemies  to  be  fought  with  by  the 
good  and  true.  There  in  visible  fact  were  the  vices  and  false- 
hoods, which  Arthur  and  his  companions  were  to  quell  and  punish. 
There  in  living  truth  were  Sansfoy  and  Sansloy^  and  Sansjoy  j  there 
were  Qjgoglio  and  G^antorto,  the  witcheries  oi  AcrasiaTm^l Phcedria 
tlie  insolence  of  Briana  and  Criidor,  And  there,  too,  were  real 
Knights  of  goodness  and  the  Gospel — Grey,  and  Ormond,  and 
Raleigh,  the  Norreyses,  St.  Leger,  and  Maltby — on  a  real  mission 
from  Gloriana's  noble  realm  to  destroy  the  enemies  of  truth  and 
virtue. 

The  allegory  bodies  forth  the  trials  which  beset  the  life  of  man 
in  all  conditions  and  at  all  times.  But  Spenser  could  never  have 
seen  in  England  such  a  strong  and  perfect  image  of  the  allegory 
itself — with  the  wild  wanderings  of  its  personages,  its  daily  chance.s 
of  battle  and  danger,  its  hairbreadth  escapes,  its  strange  encounters, 
its  prevailing  anarchy  and  violence,  its  normal  absence  of  order 
and  law — as  he  had  continually  and  customarily  before  him  in 
Ireland.  The  curse  of  God  was  so  great,*'  writes  John  Hooker, 
a  contemporary,  and  the  land  so  barren  both  of  man  and 
beast,  that  whosoever  did  travel  from  one  end  to  the  other 
of  all  Munster,  even  from  Waterford  to  Smerwick,  about  six- 
score  miles,  he  should  not  meet  man,  woman  or  child  saving  in 
cities  or  towns,  nor  yet  see  any  beast,  save  foxes,  wolves,  or 
other  ravening  beasts.''  It  is  the  desolation  through  which  Spen- 
ser's knights  pursue  their  solitary  way,  or  join  company  as  they 
can.  Indeed,  to  read  the  same  writer's  account,  for  instance,  of 
Raleigh's  adventures  with  the  Irish  chieftains,  his  challenges  and 
single  combats,  his  escapes  at  fords  and  woods,  is  like  reading  bits 
of  the  Faerie  (Itieeiie  in  prose.  As  Spenser  chose  to  write  of  knight- 
errantry,  his  picture  of  it  has  doubtless  gained  in  truth  and  strength 
by  his  very  practical  experience  of  what  such  life  as  he  describes 
must  be.    The  Faerie  Queen  might  almost  be  called  the  Epic  of 


SPENSER. 


63 


the  English  wars  in  Ireland  under  Elizabeth,  as  much  as  the  Epic  of 
English  virtue  and  valour  at  the  same  period. 

At  the  Dublin  meeting  described  by  Bryskett,  some  time  later 
than  1584,  Spenser  had  already  "well  entered  into"  his  work.  In 
1589,  he  came  to  England,  bringing  with  him  the  first  three  books  ; 
and  early  in  1590,  they  were  published.  Spenser  himself  has  told 
us  the  story  of  this  first  appearance  of  the  Faerie  Queene,  The 
person  who  discovered  the  extraordinary  work  of  genius  which  was 
growing  up  amid  the  turbulence  and  misery  and  despair  of  Ireland, 
and  who  once  more  brought  its  author  into  the  centre  of  English 
life,  was  Walter  Raleigh.  Raleigh  had  served  through  much  of  the 
Munster  war.  He  had  shown  in  Ireland  some  of  the  characteristic 
points  of  his  nature,  which  made  him  at  once  the  glory  and  shame 
of  English  manhood.  He  had  begun  to  take  a  prominent  place  in 
any  business  in  which  he  engaged.  He  had  shown  his  audacity, 
his  self-reliance,  his  resource,  and  some  signs  of  that  boundless  but 
prudent  ambition  which  marked  his  career.  He  had  shown  that 
freedom  of  tongue,  that  restless  and  high-reaching  inventiveness, 
and  that  tenacity  of  opinion,  which  made  him  a  difficult  person  for 
others  to  work  with.  Like  so  many  of  the  English  captains,  he 
hated  Ormond,  and  saw  in  his  feud  with  the  Desmonds  the  real 
cause  of  the  hopeless  disorder  of  Munster.  But  also  he  incurred 
the  displeasure  and  suspicion  of  Lord  Grey,  who  equally  disliked 
the  great  Irish  Chief,  but  who  saw  in  the  "plot"  which  Raleigh 
sent  to  Burghley  for  the  pacification  of  Munster,  an  adventurer's 
impracticable  and  self-seeking  scheme.  "  I  must  be  plain,"  he 
writes,  "  I  like  neither  his  carriage  nor  his  company."  Raleigh 
had  been  at  Smerwick:  he  had  been  in  command  of  one  of  the 
bands  put  in  by  Lord  Grey  to  do  the  execution.  On  Lord  Grey's 
departure  he  had  become  one  of  the  leading  persons  among  the 
undertakers  for  the  planting  of  Munster.  He  had  secured  for  him- 
self a  large  share  of  the  Desmond  lands.  In  1 587,  an  agreement 
among  the  undertakers  assigned  to  Sir  Walter  Raleigh,  his  associ- 
ates and  tenants,  three  seigniories  of  12,000  acres  apiece,  and  one 
of  6000,  in  Cork  and  Waterford.  But  before  Lord  Grey's  depart- 
ure Raleigh  had  left  Ireland,  and  had  found  the  true  field  for  his 
ambition  in  the  English  court.  From  1582  to  1589  he  had  shared 
with  Leicester  and  Hatton,  and  afterwards  with  Essex,  the  special 
favour  of  the  Queen.  He  had  become  Warden  of  the  Stannaries 
and  Captain  of  the  Guard.  He  had  undertaken  the  adventure  of 
founding  a  new  realm  in  America  under  the  name  of  Virginia.  He 
had  obtained  grants  of  monopolies,  farms  of  wines,  Babington's 
forfeited  estates.  His  own  great  ship,  which  he  had  built,  the  Ark 
Raleigh,  had  carried  the  flag  of  the  High  Admiral  of  England  in  the 
glorious  but  terrible  summer  of  1 588.  He  joined  in  that  tremen- 
dous sea-chase  from  Plymouth  to  the  North  Sea,  when,  as  Spenser 
wrote  to  Lord  Howard  of  Effingham — 

"  Those  huge  castles  of  Castilian  King, 

That  vainly  threatened  kingdoms  to  displace, 

Like  flying  doves,  ye  did  before  you  chase." 


64 


SPENSER. 


In  the  summer  of  1 589,  Raleigh  had  been  ousy,  as  men  of  the 
sea  were  then,  half  Queen's  servants,  half  buccaneers,  in  gathering 
the  abundant  spoils  to  be  found  on  the  high  seas  ;  and  he  had  been 
with  Sir  John  Norreys  and  Sir  Francis  Drake  in  a  bootless  but  not 
unprofitable  expedition  to  Lisbon.  On  his  return  from  the  Portu- 
gal voyage  his  court  fortunes  underwent  a  change.  Essex,  who  had 
long  scorned  that  knave  Raleigh,"  was  in  the  ascendant.  Raleigh 
foinid  the  Queen,  for  some  reason  or  another,  and  reasons  were  not 
hard  to  find,  offended  and  dangerous.  He  bent  before  the  storm. 
In  the  end  of  the  summer  of  1589,  he  was  in  Ireland,  looking  after 
his  large  seigniories,  his  lawsuits  with  the  old  proprietors,  his  castle 
at  Lismore,  and  his  schemes  for  turning  to  account  his  woods  for 
the  manufacture  of  pipe  staves  for  the  French  and  Spanish  wine 
trade. 

He  visited  Spenser,  who  was  his  neighbour,  at  Kilcolman,  and 
the  visit  led  to  important  consequences.  The  record  of  it  and  of 
the  events  which  followed  is  preserved  in  a  curious  poem  of  Spen- 
ser's written  two  or  three  years  later,  and  of  much  interest  in  re- 
gard to  Spenser's  personal  history.  Taking  up  the  old  pastoral 
form  of  the  Shepherd^s  Calejtda?^,  with  the  familiar  rustic  names  of 
the  swains  who  figured  in  its  dialogues — Hobbinol,  Cuddie,  Rosa- 
lind,  and  his  own  Colin  Clout — he  described,  under  the  usual  poeti- 
cal disguise,  the  circumstances  which  once  more  took  him  back  from 
Ireland  to  the  court.  The  court  was  the  place  to  which  all  persons 
wishing  to  push  their  way  in  the  world  were  attracted.  It  was  not 
only  the  centre  of  all  power,  the  source  of  favours  and  honours,  the 
seat  of  all  that  swayed  the  destiny  of  the  nation.  It  was  the  home 
of  refinement,  and  wit,  and  cultivation  ;  the  place  w^iere  eminence 
of  all  kinds  was  supposed  to  be  collected,  and  to  which  all  ambi- 
tions, literary  as  much  as  political,  aspired.  It  was  not  only  a 
royal  court ;  it  was  also  a  great  club.  Spenser's  poem  shows  us 
how  he  had  sped  there,  and  the  impressions  made  on  his  mind  by 
a  closer  view  of  the  persons  and  the  ways  of  that  awful  and  daz- 
zling scene,  which  exercised  such  a  spell  upon  Englishmen,  and 
which  seemed  to  combine  or  concentrate  in  itself  the  glory  and  the 
goodness  of  heaven,  and  all  the  baseness  and  malignity  of  earth. 
The  occasion  deserved  a  full  celebration  ;  it  was  indeed  a  turning- 
point  in  his  life,  for  it  led  to  the  publication  of  the  Faerie  Queene^ 
and  to  the  immediate  and  enthusiastic  recognition  by  the  English- 
men of  the  time  of  his  unrivalled  pre-eminence  as  a  poet.  In  this 
poetical  record,  Colin  Clotifs  coi7ie  ho77ie  again,  containing  in  it 
history,  criticism,  satire,  personal  recollections,  love  passages,  we 
have  the  picture  of  his  recollections  of  the  flush  and  excitement  of 
those  months  which  saw  the  first  appearance  of  the  Faerie  Qiieene, 
He  describes  the  interruption  of  his  retired  and,  as  he  paints  it, 
peaceful  and  pastoral  life  in  his  Irish  home,  by  the  appearance  of 
Raleigh  the  Shepherd  of  the  Ocean,"  from  "  the  main  sea  deep." 
They  may  have  been  thrown  together  before.  Both  had  been 
patronised  by  Leicester.  Both  had  been  together  at  Smerwick,  and 
probably  in  other  passages  of  the  Munster  war  ;  both  had  served 


SPEA'SER. 


under  Lord  Grey,  Spenser's  master,  though  he  had  been  no  lover 
of  Raleigh.  In  their  different  degrees,  Raleigh  with  his  two  or  three 
seigniories  of  half  a  county,  and  Spenser  with  his  more  modest 
estate,  they  were  embarked  in  the  same  enterprise,  the  plantation 
of  Munster.  But  Raleigh  now  appeared  before  Spenser  in  all  the 
glory  of  a  brilliant  favourite — the  soldier,  the  explorer,  the  daring 
sea-captain,  the  founder  of  plantations  across  the  ocean,  and  withal, 
the  poet,  the  ready  and  eloquent  discourser,  the  true  judge  and 
measurer  of  what  was  great  or  beautiful. 

The  time,  too,  was  one  at  once  of  excitement  and  repose.  Men 
felt  as  they  feel  after  a  great  peril,  a  great  effort,  a  great  relief ; 
as  the  Greeks  did  after  Salamis  and  Plataea,  as  our  fathers  did 
after  Waterloo.  In  the  struggle  in  the  Channel  with  the  might  of 
Spain,  England  had  recognised  its  force  and  its  prospects.  One 
of  those  solemn  moments  had  just  passed  when  men  see  before 
them  the  course  of  the  world  turned  one  way,  when  it  might  have 
been  turned  another.  All  the  world  had  been  looking  out  to  see 
what  would  come  to  pass  ;  and  nowhere  more  eagerly  than  in 
Ireland.  Every  one,  English  and  Irish  alike,  stood  agaze  to  "see 
how^  the  game  would  be  played."  The  great  fleet,  as  it  drew  near, 
'Svo-rked  wonderfully  uncertain  yet  calm  humours  in  the  people, 
not  daring  to  disclose  their  real  intention.''  When  all  was  decided, 
and  the  distressed  ships  were  cast  away  on  the  western  coast,  the 
Irish  showed  as  much  zeal  as  the  English  in  fulfilling  the  orders 
of  the  Irish  council,  to  "  apprehend  and  execute  all  Spaniards 
found  there  of  what  quality  soever."  These  were  the  impressions 
under  which  the  two  men  met.  Raleigh,  at  the  moment,  was  under 
a  cloud.    In  the  poetical  fancy  picture  set  before  us— 

His  song  was  all  a  lamentable  lay 

Of  great  unkindnesse,  and  of  usage  hard, 

Of  Cynthia  the  Ladie  of  the  Sea, 

Which  from  her  presence  faultlesse  him  debard. 

And  ever  and  anon,  with  singults  rife, 

He  cryed  out,  to  make  his  undersong ; 

Ah  !  my  loves  queene,  and  goddesse  of  my  life, 

Who  shall  me  pittie,  when  thou  doest  me  wrong  .J*'* 

At  Kilcolman,  Raleigh  became  acquainted  with  what  Spenser 
had  done  of  the  Faerie  Queene.  His  rapid  and  clear  judgment 
showed  him  how  immeasurably  it  rose  above  all  that  had  yet  been 
produced  under  the  name  of  poetry  in  England.  That  alone  is 
sufficient  to  account  for  his  eager  desire  that  it  should  be  known 
in  England.  But  Raleigh  always  had  an  eye  to  his  own  affairs, 
marred  as  they  so  often  were  by  ill-fortune  and  his  own  mistakes; 
and  he  may  have  thought  of  making  his  peace  with  Cynthia  by 
reintroducing  at  Court  the  friend  of  Philip  Sidney,  now  ripened 
into  a  poet  not  unworthy  of  Gloriana's  greatness.  This  is  Colin 
Clout's  account ; 

When  thus  our  pipes  wc  both  had  wearied  well, 
(Quoth  he)  and  each  an  end  of  singing  made, 


SFENSEI^. 


He  gan  to  cast  great  lyking  to  my  lore, 

And  great  dislyking  to  my  lucklesse  lot, 

That  banisht  had  my  selfe,  like  wight  forlore. 

Into  that  waste,  where  I  was  quite  forgot. 

The  which  to  leave,  thenceforth  he  counseld  mee, 

Unmeet  for  man,  in  whom  was  aught  regardfull, 

And  wend  with  him,  his  Cynthia  to  see  : 

Whose  grace  was  great,  and  bounty  most  rewardfull  s 

Besides  her  peerlesse  skill  in  making  well, 

And  all  the  ornaments  of  wondrous  wit, 

Such  as  all  womankynd  did  far  excell, 

Such  as  the  world  admyr'd,  and  praised  it. 

So  what  with  hope  of  good,  and  hate  of  ill, 

He  me  perswaded  forth  with  him  to  fare. 

Nought  tooke  I  with  me,  but  mine  oaten  quill : 

Small  needments  else  need  shepheard  to  prepare. 

So  to  the  sea  we  came  ;  the  sea,  that  is 

A  world  of  waters  heaped  up  on  hie, 

Rolling  like  mountaines  in  wide  wildcrnesse, 

Horrible,  hideous,  roaring  with  hoarse  crie." 

This  is  followed  by  a  spirited  description  of  a  sea-voyage,  and  of 
that  empire  of  the  seas  in  which,  since  the  overthrow  of  the 
Armada,  England  and  England's  mistress  were  now  claiming  to 
be  supreme,  and  of  which  Raleigh  was  one  of  the  most  active  and 
distinguished  officers : 

"  And  yet  as  ghastly  dreadfull,  as  it  seemes, 
Bold  men,  presuming  life  forgaine  to  sell, 
Dare  tempt  that  gulf,  and  in  those  wandring  stremes 
Seek  waies  unknowne,  waies  leading  down  to  hell. 
For,  as  we  stood  there  waiting  on  the  strond, 
Behold  !  an  huge  great  vessell  to  us  came, 
Dauncing  upon  the  waters  back  to  lond, 
As  if  it  scornd  the  daunger  of  the  same ; 
Yet  was  it  but  a  wooden  frame  and  fraile, 
Glewed  togither  with  some  subtile  matter. 
Yet  had  it  armes  and  wings,  and  head  and  taile, 
And  life  to  move  it  selfe  upon  the  water. 
Strange  thing  !  how  bold  and  swift  the  monster  wat, 
That  neither  car'd  for  v/ind,  nor  haile,  nor  raine, 
Nor  swelling  waves,  but  thorough  them  did  passe 
So  proudly,  that  she  made  them  roare  againe. 
The  same  aboord  us  gently  did  receave. 
And  without  harme  us  farre  away  did  beare. 
So  farre  that  land,  our  mother,  us  did  leave, 
And  nought  but  sea  and  heaven  to  us  appeare. 
Then  hartlesse  quite,  and  full  of  inward  feare, 
That  shepheard  I  besought  to  me  to  tell. 
Under  what  skie,  or  in  what  world  we  were, 
In  which  I  saw  no  living  people  dwell. 
Who,  me  recomforting  all  that  he  might, 
Told  me  that  that  same  was  the  Regiment 
Of  a  great  Shepheardesse,  that  Cynthia  hight 
His  liege,  his  Ladie,  and  his  lifes  Regent." 


SPRNSEK. 


67 


This  is  the  poetical  version  of  Raleigh's  appreciation  of  the 
treasure  which  he  had  lighted  on  in  Irehmd,  and  of  what  he  did 
to  make  it  known  to  the  admiration  and  delight  of  England.  He 
returned  to  the  Court,  and  Spenser  with  him.  Again,  for  what 
reason  we  know  not,  he  was  received  into  favour.  The  poet,  who 
accompanied  him,  was  brought  to  the  presence  of  the  lady,  who 
saw  herself  in  ''various  mirrors'' — Cynthia,  Gloriana,  Belphoebe, 
as  she  heard  him  read  portions  of  the  great  poem  which  was  to 
add  a  new  glory  to  her  reign. 

"  The  Shepheard  of  the  Ocean  (quoth  he) 
Unto  that  Goddesse  grace  me  first  enhanced, 
And  to  mine  oaten  pipe  enclin'd  her  care, 
That  she  thenceforth  therein  gan  take  delight ; 
And  it  desir'd  at  timely  houres  to  heare, 
All  were  my  notes  but  rude  and  roughly  dight ; 
For  not  by  measure  of  her  owne  great  mynde, 
And  wondrous  worth,  she  mott  my  simple  song, 
But  joyd  that  country  shepheard  ought  could  fynd 
Worth  harkening  to,  emongst  the  learned  throng." 

He  had  already  too  well  caught  the  trick  of  flattery — flattery 
in  a  degree  almost  inconceivable  to  us — which  the  fashions  of  the 
time,  and  the  Queen's  strange  self-deceit,  exacted  from  the  loyalty 
and  enthusiasm  of  Enghshmen.  In  that  art  Raleigh  was  only  too 
apt  a  teacher.  Colin  Clout,  in  his  story  of  his  recollections  of  the 
Court,  lets  us  see  how  he  was  taught  to  think  and  to  speak  there  : 

"  But  if  I  her  like  ought  on  earth  might  read, 
I  would  her  lyken  to  a  crowne  of  lillies, 
Upon  a  virgin  brydes  adorned  head, 
With  Roses  dight  and  Goolds  and  Daffadillies; 
Or  like  the  circlet  of  a  Turtle  true, 
In  which  all  colours  of  the  rainbow  bee  ; 
Or  like  faire  Phebes  garlond  shining  new, 
In  which  all  pure  perfection  one  may  see. 
But  vaine  it  is  to  thinke,  by  paragone 
Of  earthly  things,  to  judge  of  things  divine : 
Her  power,  her  mercy,  her  wisdome,  none 
Can  deeme,  but  who  the  Godhead  can  define. 
Why  then  do  I,  base  shepheard,  bold  and  blind 
Presume  the  things  so  sacred  to  prophane  ? 
More  fit  it  is  t'  adore,  with  humble  mind. 
The  image  of  the  heavens  in  shade  humane." 

The  Queen,  who  heard  herself  thus  celebrated,  celebrated  not  only 
as  a  semi-divine  person,  but  as  herself  unrivalled  in  the  art  of 
"  making  "  or  poetry — "  her  peerless  skill  in  making  well  " — granted 
Spenser  a  pension  of  50/.  a  year,  which,  it  is  said,  the  prosaic  and 
frugal  Lord  Treasurer,  always  hard-driven  for  money  and  not  caring 
much  for  poets,  made  difficulties  about  paying.  But  the  new  poem 
was  not  for  the  Queen's  ear  only.  In  the  registers  of  the  Station- 
ers' Company  occurs  the  following  entry  : 


68 


SPENSER. 


Primo  die  Decern bris  [1589]. 
Mr.  Ponsonoye — Entered  for  his  Copye,  abook  in  t^'tuled  the  fay  rye 
Queene  dysposed  into  xij  bookes  &c.,  authorysed  under  thandes  of  the 
Archbishop  of  Canterbery  and  bothe  the  Wardens.  vjd." 

Thus,  between  pamphlets  of  the  hour — an  account  of  the  Arms  of 
the  City  Companies  on  one  side,  and  the  last  news  from  France  on 
the  other — the  first  of  our  great  modern  English  poems  was  licensed 
to  make  its  appearance.  It  appeared  soon  after,  with  the  date  of 
1 590.  It  was  not  the  twelve  books,  but  only  the  first  three.  It  was 
accompanied  and  introduced,  as  usual,  by  a  great  host  of  commen- 
datory and  laudatory  sonnets  and  poems.  All  the  leading  person- 
ages at  Elizabeth's  court  were  appealed  to  ;  according  to  their 
several  tastes  or  their  relations  to  the  poet,  they  are  humbly 
asked  to  befriend,  or  excuse,  or  welcome  his  poetical  venture.  The 
list  itself  is  worth  quoting: — Sir  Christopher  Hatton,  then  Lord 
Chancellor,  the  Earls  of  Essex,  Oxford,  Northumberland,  Ormond, 
Lord  Howard  of  Efiingham,  Lord  Grey  of  Wilton,  Sir  Walter 
Raleigh,  Lord  Burghley,  the  Earl  of  Cumberland,  Lord  Hunsdon, 
Lord  Buckhurst,  Walsingham,  Sir  John  Norris,  President  of  Mun- 
ster.  He  addresses  Lady  Pembroke,  in  remembrance  of  her 
brother,  that    heroic  spirit,"  *•  the  glory  of  our  days," 

Who  first  my  Muse  did  lift  out  of  the  floor, 
To  sing  his  sweet  delights  in  lowly  lays." 

And  he  finishes  with  a  sonnet  to  Lady  Carew,  one  of  Sir  John 
Spencer's  daughters,  and  another  to  all  the  gracious  and  beauti- 
ful ladies  of  the  Court,"  in  wdiich  "the  world's  pride  seems  to  be 
gathered."  There  come  also  congratulations  and  praises  for  him- 
self. Raleigh  addressed  to  him  a  fine  but  extravagant  sonnet,  in 
which  he  imagined  Petrarch  weeping  for  envy  at  the  approval  of 
the  Faerie  Queene,  while  "  Oblivion  laid  him  down  on  Laura's 
hearse,"  and  even  Homer  trembled  for  his  fame.  Gabriel  Harvey 
revoked  his  judgment  on  the  Elvish  Qiieen,  and,  not  without  some 
regret  for  less  ambitious  days  in  the  past,  cheered  on  his  friend  in 
his  noble  enterprise.  Gabriel  Harvey  has  been  so  much,  and  not 
without  reason,  laughed  at,  and  yet  his  verses  welcoming  the  Faerie 
Queene  are  so  full  of  true  and  warm  friendship,  and  of  unexpected 
refinement  and  grace,  that  it  is  but  just  to  cite  them.  In  the  eyes 
of  the  world  he  was  an  absurd  personage  :  but  Spenser  saw  in  him 
perhaps  his  worthiest  and  trustiest  friend.  A  generous  and  simple 
affection  has  almost  got  the  better  in  them  of  ^edantry  and  false 
taste. 

"  Collyn,  I  see,  by  thy  new  taken  taske, 

Some  sacred  fury  hath  enrich t  thy  braynes, 
That  leades  thy  muse  in  haughty  verse  to  maske, 

And  loath  the  laycs  that  longs  to  lowly  swaynes; 
That  lifts  thy  notes  from  vShe])heardes  unto  kinges  : 
So  like  the  lively  Larkc  that  mounting  singes. 


SPENSER. 


69 


**Thy  lovely  Rosolinde  seemes  now  foilorne, 
And  all  thy  gentle  flockes  forgotten  quight 
Thy  chaunged  hart  now  holdes  thy  pypcs  in  scorne, 
Those  prety  pypes  that  did  thy  mates  delight ; 
Those  trusty  mates,  that  loved  thee  so  well ; 
Whom  thou  gav'st  mirth,  as  they  gave  thee  the  bell. 

*Yet,  as  thou  earst  with  thy  sweete  roundelayes 

Didst  stirre  to  glee  our  laddes  in  homely  bowers  ; 

So  moughtst  thou  now  in  these  refyned  layes 
Delight  the  daintie  eares  of  higher  powers  : 

And  so  mought  they,  in  their  deepc  skanning  skill 

Alow  and  grace  our  Collyns  flowing  quyll. 

**  And  faire  befall  that  Faerie  Qtieene  of  thine, 

In  whose  faire  eyes  love  linckt  with  vertue  sittes 
Enfusing,  by  those  bewties  fyers  devyne, 

Such  high  conceites  into  thy  humble  wittes, 
As  raised  hath  poore  pastors  oaten  reedes 
From  rustick  tunes,  to  chaunt  heroique  deedes. 

**So  mought  thy  Redcrosse  Knight  with  happy  hand 

Victorious  be  in  that  faire  Ilands  right, 
Which  thou  dost  vayle  in  Type  of  Faery  land, 

Elizas  blessed  field,  that  Albion  hight  : 
That  shieldes  her  friendes,  and  warres  her  migbtie  foes, 
Yet  still  with  people,  peace,  and  plentie  flowes. 

"  But  (jolly  shepheard)  though  with  pleasing  style 
Thou  feast  the  humour  of  the  Courtly  trayne, 
Let  not  conceipt  thy  setled  sence  beguile, 

Ne  daunted  be  through  envy  or  disdaine. 
Subject  thy  dome  to  her  Empyring  spright, 
From  whence  thy  Muse,  and  all  the  world,  takes  light. 

HOBYNOLL." 

And  to  the  Queen  herself  Spenser  presented  his  work,  in  one 
of  the  boldest  dedications  perhaps  ever  penned  : 

"To 

The  Most  High,  Mightie,  and  Magnificent 
Empresse, 

Reiiowmed  for  piety,  vertve,  and  all  gratiovs  government, 
ELIZABETH, 
By  the  Grace  of  God, 
Qveene  of  England,  Fravnce,  and  Ireland,  and  of  Virginia, 
Defendovr  of  the  Faith,  &c. 
Her  most  hvmble  Servavnt 
Edmvnd  Spenser, 
Doth,  in  all  hvmilitie. 
Dedicate,  present,  and  consecrate 
These  his  labovrs, 
To  live  with  the  eternitie  of  her  fame." 


"  To  live  with  the  eternity  of  her  fame  " — the  claim  was  a  proud 


SPENSER. 


one,  Lut  it  has  proved  a  prophecy.  The  publication  of  the  Faerie 
Queene  placed  him  at  once  and  for  his  life-time  at  the  head  of  all 
living  English  poets.  The  world  of  his  day  immediately  acknowl- 
edged the  charm  and  perfection  of  the  new  work  of  art  which  had 
taken  it  by  surprise.  As  far  as  appears,  it  was  welcomed  heartily 
and  generously.  Spenser  speaks  in  places  of  envy  and  detraction, 
and  he,  like  others,  had  no  doubt  his  rivals  and  enemies.  But  little 
trace  of  censure  appears,  except  in  the  stories  about  Burghley's 
disHke  of  him,  as  an  idle  rimer,  and  perhaps  as  a  friend  of  his  op- 
ponents. But  his  brother  poets,  men  like  Lodge  and  Drayton,  paid 
honour,  though  in  quaint  phrases,  to  the  learned  Colin,  the  reverend 
Colin,  the  excellent  and  cunning  Colin.  A  greater  than  they,  if  we 
may  trust  his  editors,  takes  him  as  the  representative  of  poetry, 
which  is  so  dear  to  him. 

"  If  music  and  sweet  poetry  agree, 
As  they  must  needs,  the  sister  and  the  brother, 
Then  must  the  love  be  great  'twixt  thee  and  me, 
Because  thou  lov'st  the  one,  and  I  the  other. 
Dowlaiid  to  thee  is  dear,  whose  heavenly  touch 
Upon  the  lute  doth  ravish  human  sense ; 
Spejiser  to  me,  whose  deep  conceit  is  such 
As  passing  all  conceit,  needs  no  defence. 
Thou  lov'st  to  hear  the  sweet  melodious  sound 
That  Phoebus'  lute,  the  queen  of  music,  makes 
And  I  in  deep  delight  am  chiefly  drown'd 
Whenas  himself  to  singing  he  betakes. 
One  god  is  god  of  both,  as  poets  feign ; 
One  knight  loves  both,  and  both  in  thee  remain." 

{Shakespere^  in  the  "  Passio7iate  Pilgriniy^  1599') 

Even  the  fierce  pamphleteer,  Thomas  Nash,  the  scourge  and 
torment  of  poor  Gabriel  Harvey,  addresses  Harvey's  friend  as 
heavenly  Spenser,  and  extols  "  the  Faerie  Singers'  stately  tuned 
verse.'*  Spenser's  title  to  be  the  "  Poet  of  poets  "  was  at  once  ac- 
knowledged as  by  acclamation.  And  he  himself  has  no  difficulty 
in  accepting  his  position.  In  some  lines  on  the  death  of  a  friend's 
wife,  whom  he  laments  and  praises,  the  idea  presents  itself  that  the 
great  queen  may  not  approve  of  her  Shepherd  wasting  his  lays  on 
meaner  persons,  and  he  puts  into  his  friend's  mouth  a  deprecation 
of  her  possible  jealousy.  The  lines  are  characteristic,  both  in  their 
beauty  and  music,  and  in  the  strangeness,  in  our  eyes,  of  the  excuse 
made  for  the  poet. 

Ne  let  Eliza,  royall  Shepheardesse, 

The  praises  of  my  parted  love  envy. 

For  she  hath  praises  in  all  plenteousnesse 

Powr'd  upon  her,  like  showers  of  Castaly, 

By  her  own  Shepheard,  Colin,  her  owne  Shephcard, 

That  her  with  heavenly  hymnes  doth  deifie, 

Of  rustick  muse  full  hardly  to  be  betterd. 


SPENSER. 


71 


She  is  the  Rose,  the  glorie  of  the  day, 

And  m\ne  the  Primrose  in  the  lowly  shade : 

Mine,  ah  !  not  mine  ;  amisse  I  mine  did  say  : 

Not  mine,  but  His,  which  mine  awhile  her  made  ; 

Mine  to  be  His,  with  him  to  live  for  ay. 

O  that  so  faire  a  flower  so  soone  should  fade, 

And  through  untimely  tempest  fall  away  I 

"  She  fell  away  in  her  first  ages  spring, 
WhliVt  yet  her  leafe  was  greene,  and  fresh  her  rindc, 
And  whilst  her  braunch  faire  blossomes  foorth  did  bring, 
She  fell  away  against  all  course  of  kinde. 
For  age  to  dye  is  right,  but  youth  is  wrong  ;  ^ 
She  fel  away  like  fruit  blowne  downe  with  winde. 
Weepe,  Shepheard!  weepe,  to  make  my  undersong." 

Thus  in  both  his  literary  enterprises  Spenser  had  been  signally 
successful.  The  Shepherd's  Calendar,  in  1580,  had  immediately 
raised  high  hopes  of  his  powers.  The  Faerie  Queene,  in  1590,  had 
more  than  fulfilled  them.  In  the  interval  a  considerable  change 
had  happened  in  English  cultivation.  Shakespere  had  come  to 
London,  though  the  world  did  not  yet  know  all  that  he  was.  Sid- 
ney had  published  his  Defence  of  Poesie,  and  had  written  the  Ar- 
cadia^ though  it  was  not  yet  published.  Marlowe  had  begun  to 
write,  and  others  beside  him  were  preparing  the  change  which  was 
to  come  on  the  English  Drama.  Two  scholars  who  had  shared 
with  Spenser  in  the  bounty  of  Robert  Nowell  were  beginning,  in 
different  lines,  to  raise  the  level  of  thought  and  style.  Hooker  was 
beginning  to  give  dignity  to  controversy,  and  to  show  what  English 
prose  might  rise  to.  Lancelot  Andrewes,  Spenser's  junior  at  school 
and  college,  was  training  himself  at  St.  Paul's  to  lead  the  way  to  a 
larger  and  higher  kind  of  preaching  than  the  English  clergy  had  yet 
reached.  The  change  of  scene  from  Ireland  to  the  centre  of  Eng- 
lish interests  must  have  been,  as  Spenser  describes  it,  very  im- 
pressive. England  was  alive  with  aspiration  and  effort :  imagina- 
tions were  inflamed  and  hearts  stirred  by  the  deeds  of  men  who  de- 
scribed with  the  same  energy  with  which  they  acted.  Amid  such 
influences  and  with  such  a  friend  as  Raleigh',  Spenser  may  natur- 
ally have  been  tempted  by  some  of  the  dreams  of  advancement  of 
which  Raleigh's  soul  was  full.  There  is  strong  probability,  from 
the  language  of  his  later  poems,  that  he  indulged  such  hopes,  and 
that  they  were  disappointed.  A  year  after  the  entry  in  the  Station- 
ers' Register  of  the  Faerie  Queene  (29  Dec,  1590),  Ponsonby,  his 
publisher,  entered  a  volume  of  Cofnplaints,  containing  sund?y 
small  Poems  of  the  World's  Vanity,''^  to  which  he  prefixed  the  fol- 
lowing notice  : 

"The  Printer  to  the  Gentle  Reader. 

Since  my  late  setting  foorth  of  the  Faerie  Queene,  finding  that  it  hath 
found  a  favourable  passage  amongst  you,  I  have  sithence  endevoured  by 


72 


SPENSER, 


all  good  meanes  (for  the  better  encrease  and  accomplishment  of  your  de. 
lights),  to  get  into  my  handes  such  smale  Poemes  of  the  same  Authors,  as 
I  heard  were  disperst  abroad  in  sundrie  hands,  and  not  easie  to  bee  come 
by,  by  himselfe  ;  some  of  them  having  bene  diverslie  imbeziled  and  pur- 
loyned  from  him  since  his  departure  over  Sea.  Of  the  which  I  have,  by 
good  meanes,  gathered  togeather  these  fewe  parcels  present,  which  I  have 
caused  to  bee  imprinted  altogeather,  for  that  they  all  seeme  to  containe 
like  matter  of  argument  in  them  ;  being  all  complaints  and  meditations  of 
the  worlds  vanitie,  verie  grave  and  profitable.  To  which  effect  I  under- 
stand that  he  besides  wrote  sundrie  others,  namelie  Ecclesiastes  and  Can* 
iicum  canticorutn^  X.xz.\\^2XtA  A  senights  slumber^  The  hell  of  lovers^  his  Pur^ 
gatoriey  being  all  dedicated  to  Ladies  ;  so  as  it  may  seeme  he  ment  them 
all  to  one  volume.  Besides  some  other  Pamphlets  looselie  scattered 
abroad  :  as  The  dying  Pellica-n^  The  howers  of  the  Lord,  The  sacrifice  of  a 
sinner^  The  seven  Psalmes,  &c.,  which,  when  I  can,  either  by  himselfe  or 
otherwise,  attaine  too,  I  meane  likewise  for  your  favour  sake  to  set  foorth. 
In  the  meane  time,  praying  you  gentlie  to  accept  of  these,  and  graciouslie 
to  entertaine  the  new  Poet,  /  take  leavei'^ 

The  collection  is  a  miscellaneous  one,  both  as  to  subjects  and 
date:  it  contains,  among  other  things,  the  translations  from  Pe- 
trarch and  Du  Bellay,  which  had  appeared  in  Vander  Noodt's 
Theatre  of  .Worldlings,  in  1569.  But  there  are  also  some  pieces 
of  later  date ;  and  they  disclose  not  only  personal  sorrows  and 
griefs,  but  also  an  experience  which  had  ended  in  disgust  and  disap- 
pointment. In  spite  of  Raleigh's  friendship,  he  had  found  that  in 
the  Court  he  was  not  likely  to  thrive.  The  two  powerful  men  who 
had  been  his  earliest  friends  had  disappeared.  Philip  Sidney  had 
died  in  1586;  Leicester,  soon  after  the  destruction  of  the  Armada, 
in  1588.  And  they  had  been  followed  (April  1590)  by  Sidney's 
powerful  father-in-law,  Francis  Walsingham.  The  death  of  Lei- 
cester, untended,  unlamented,  powerfully  impressed  Spenser,  al- 
ways keenly  alive  to  the  pathetic  vicissitudes  of  human  greatness. 
In  one  of  these  pieces,  The  Ruins  of  Ti7ne,  addressed  to  Sidney's 
sister,  the  Countess  of  Pembroke,  Spenser  thus  imagines  the  death 
of  Leicester — 

"  It  is  not  long,  since  these  two  eyes  beheld 
A  mightie  Prince,  of  most  renowmed  race. 
Whom  England  high  in  count  of  honour  held, 
And  greatest  ones  did  sue  to  gaine  his  grace ; 
Of  greatest  ones  he,  greatest  in  his  place, 
Sate  in  the  bosome  of  his  Soveraine, 
And  Right  and  loyall  did  his  word  maintaine, 

"  I  saw  him  die,  I  saw  him  die,  as  one 
Of  the  meane  people,  and  brought  foorth  on  beare 
I  saw  him  die,  and  no  man  left  to  mone 
His  dolefull  fate,  that  late  him  loved  deare 
Scarse  anie  left  to  close  his  eyelids  neare 
Scarse  anie  left  upon  his  lips  to  laie 
The  sacred  sod,  or  Requiem  to  saie. 


SPENSER. 


73 


*'  ()  1  trustless  state  of  miserable  men, 
That  builde  your  blis  on  hope  of  earthly  thing. 
And  vainlie  thinke  your  selves  halfe  happie  then, 
When  painted  faces  with  smooth  flattering 
Doo  fawne  on  you,  and  your  wide  praises  sing; 
And,  when  the  courting  masker  louteth  lowe, 
Him  true  in  heart  and  trustie  to  you  trow." 

For  Sidney,  the  darling  of  the  time,  who  had  been  to  him  not 
merely  a  cordial  friend,  but  the  realised  type  of  all  that  was  glori- 
ous in  manhood,  and  beautiful  in  character  and  gifts,  his  mourning 
was  more  than  that  of  a  looker-on  at  a  moving  instance  of  the 
frailty  of  greatness.  It  was  the  poet's  sorrow  for  the  poet,  who 
had  almost  been  to  him  what  the  elder  brother  is  to  the  younger. 
Both  now,  and  in  later  years,  his  affection  for  one  who  w^as  be- 
come to  him  a  glorified  saint,  showed  itself  in  deep  and  genuine 
expression,  through  the  affectations  which  crowned  the  horse  " 
of  Astrophel  and  Philisides.  He  was  persuaded  that  Sidney's 
death  had  been  a  grave  blow  to  literature  and  learning.  The  Ruins 
of  Time,  and  still  more  the  l^ears  of  the  Muses,  are  full  of  lamen- 
tations over  returning  barbarism  and  ignorance,  and  the  slight  ac- 
count made  by  those  in  power  of  the  gifts  and  the  arts  of  the  writer, 
the  poet,  and  the  dramatist.  Under  what  was  popularly  thought 
the  crabbed  and  parsimonious  administration  of  Burghley,  and  with 
the  churlishness  of  the  Puritans,  whom  he  was  supposed  to  foster, 
it  seemed  as  if  the  poetry  of  the  time  was  passing  away  in  chill 
discouragement.  The  effect  is  described  in  lines  which,  as  we  now 
naturally  supposed,  and  Dryden  also  thought,  can  refer  to  no  one 
but  Shakespere.  But  it  seems  doubtful  whether  all  this  could 
have  been  said  of  Shakespere  in  1590.  It  seems  more  likely  that 
this  also  is  an  extravagant  compliment  to  Philip  Sidney,  and  his 
masking  performances.  He  was  lamented  elsewhere  under  the 
poetical  name  of  Willy.  If  it  refers  to  him,  it  was  probably  written 
before  his  death,  though  not  published  till  after  it ;  for  the  lines 
imply,  not  that  he  is  literally  dead,  but  that  he  is  in  retirement. 
The  expression  that  he  is  "  dead  of  late,"  is  explained  in  four  lines 
below,  as  "choosing  to  sit  in  idle  cell,"  and  is  one  of  Spenser's 
common  figures  for  inactivity  or  sorrow.* 

The  verses  are  the  lamentations  of  the  Muse  of  Comedy. 

"  Thalia. 

"Where  be  the  sweete  delights  of  learning's  treasure 
That  wont  with  Comick  sock  to  beautefie 
The  painted  Theaters,  and  fill  with  pleasure 
The  listners  eyes  and  eares  with  melodie ; 
In  which  I  late  was  wont  to  raine  as  Queene, 
And  maske  in  mirth  with  Graces  well  beseene  ? 

"O  !  all  is  gone;  and  all  that  goodly  glee, 
Which  wont  to  be  the  glorie  of  gay  wits, 
Is  layed  abed,  and  no  where  now  to  see  ; 

*  V,  Colin  Clout,  1.  31.    A  strophe  I ^  1.  175. 


74 


SFENSEK, 


And  in  her  roome  unseemly  Sorrow  sits, 
With  hollow  browes  and  grcisly  countenauncCp 
Marring  my  joyous  gentle  dalliaunce. 

''And  him  beside  sits  ugly  BarbarismCy 
And  brutish  Ignorance,  ycrept  of  late 
Out  of  dredd  darknes  of  the  deepe  Abysme, 
Where  being  bredd,  he  light  and  heaven  does  hate  J 
They  in  the  mindes  of  men  now  tyrannize, 
And  the  faire  Scene  with  rudenes  foule  disguize 

"All  places  they  with  follie  have  possest, 
And  with  vaine  toyes  the  vulgare  entertaine ; 
But  me  have  banished,  with  all  the  rest 
That  whilome  wont  to  wait  upon  my  traine, 
Fine  Counterfesaunce,  and  unhurtfull  Sport; 
Delight,  and  Laughter,  deckt  in  seemly  sort. 

'"^All  these,  and  all  that  els  the  Comick  Stage 
With  seasoned  wit  and  goodly  pleasance  graced, 
By  which  mans  life  in  his  likest  image 
Was  limned  forth,  are  wholly  now  defaced  ; 
And  those  sweete  wits,  which  wont  the  like  to  framCi 
Are  now  despizd,  and  made  a  laughing  game. 

"  And  he,  the  man  whom  Nature  selfe  had  made 
To  mock  her  selfe,  and  truth  to  imitate, 
With  kindly  counter  under  Mimick  shade, 
Our  pleasant  Willy,  ah  !  is  dead  of  late  ; 
With  whom  all  joy  and  jolly  merriment 
Is  also  dreaded,  and  in  dolour  drent, 

****** 

"  But  that  same  gentle  Spirit,  from  whose  pen 
Large  streames  of  honnie  and  sweete  Nectar  flowe, 
Scorning  the  boldnes  of  such  base-borne  men. 
Which  dare  their  follies  forth  so  rashlie  throwe. 
Doth  rather  choose  to  sit  in  idle  Cell, 
Than  so  himsclfe  to  mockerie  to  sell/* 

But  the  most  remarkable  of  these  pieces  is  a  satirical  fable_ 
Mother  Htcbberd^s  Tale  of  the  Ape  and  Fox,  which  may  take  rank 
with  the  satirical  writings  of  Chaucer  and  Dryden  for  keenness  of 
touch,  breadth  of  treatment,  for  swing  and  fiery  scorn,  and  sus- 
tained strength  of  sarcasm.  By  his  visit  to  the  Court,  Spenser  had 
increased  his  knowledge  of  the  realities  of  life.  That  brilliant 
Court,  with  a  goddess  at  its  head,  and  full  of  charming  swains  and 
divine  nymphs,  had  also  another  side.  It  was  still  his  poetical 
heaven.  But  with  that  odd  insensibility  to  anomaly  and  glaring 
contrasts,  which  is  seen  in  his  time,  and  perhaps  exists  at  all  times, 
he  passed  from  the  celebration  of  the  dazzling  glories  of  Cynthia's 
Court  into  a  fierce  vein  of  invective  against  its  treacheries,  its  vain 
shows,  its  unceasing  and  mean  intrigues,  its  savage  jealousies,  its 


SPENSER. 


fatal  rivalries,  the  scramble  there  for  preferment  in  Church  and 
State.  When  it  is  considered  what  great  persons  might  easily  and 
naturally  have  been  identified  at  the  time  w^ith  the  Ape  and  ihe  E^ox^ 
the  confederate  impostors,  charlatans,  and  bullying  swindlers,  who 
had  stolen  the  lion's  skin,  and  by  it  mounted  to  the  high  places  of 
the  wState,  it  seems  to  be  a  proof  of  the  indifference  of  the  Court 
to  the  power  of  mere  literature,  that  it  should  have  been  safe  to 
write  and  publish  so  freely  and  so  cleverly.  Dull  Catholic  lam- 
poons and  Puritan  scurrilities  did  not  pass  thus  unnoticed.  They 
were  viewed  as  dangerous  to  the  State,  and  dealt  v/ith  accordingly. 
The  fable  contains  what  we  can  scarcely  doubt  to  be  some  of  that 
wisdom  which  Spenser  learnt  by  his  experience  of  the  Court. 

"  So  pitifull  a  thing  is  Suters  state  ! 
Most  miserable  man,  whom  wicked  fate 
Hath  brought  to  Court,  to  sue  for  had-ywist, 
That  few  have  found,  and  manie  one  hath  mist 
Full  little  knowest  thou,  that  hast  not  tride, 
What  hell  it  is  in  suing  long  to  bide: 
To  loose  good  dayes,  that  might  be  better  spent ; 
To  wast  long  nights  in  pensive  discontent ; 
To  speed  to  day,  to  be  put  back  to-morrow  ; 
To  feed  on  hope,  to  pine  with  feare  and  sorrow  ; 
To  have  thy  Princes  grace,  yot  want  her  Peeres ' 
To  have  thy  asking,  yet  waite  manie  yeeres; 
To  fret  thy  soule  with  crosses  and  with  cares ; 
To  eate  thy  heart  through  comfortlesse  dispaires ; 
To  fawne,  to  crowche,  to  waite,  to  ride,  to  ronne, 
To  spend,  to  give,  to  want,  to  be  undonne. 
Unhappie  wight,  borne  to  disastrous  end, 
That  doth  his  life  in  so  long  tendance  spend ! 

"  Who  ever  leaves  sweete  home,  where  meane  estate 
In  safe  assurance,  without  strife  or  hate, 
Findes  all  things  needful!  for  contentment  meeke, 
And  will  to  Court  for  shadowes  vaine  to  seeke, 
Or  hope  to  gaine,  himselfe  will  a  daw  trie  : 
That  curse  God  send  unto  mine  enemie !  " 

Spenser  probably  did  not  mean  his  characters  to  fit  too  closely 
to  living  persons.  That  miglit  have  been  dangerous^  But  it  is 
difficult  to  believe  that  he  had  not  distinctly  in  his  eye  a  very  great 
personage,  the  greatest  in  England  next  to  the  Queen,  in  the  fol- 
lowing picture  of  the  doings  of  the  Fox  installed  at  Court. 

*'But  the  false  Foxc  most  kindly  plaid  his  partj 
For  whatsoever  mother-wit  or  arte 
Could  worke,  he  put  in  proofe  :  no  practise  slie, 
No  counterpoint  of  cunning  policic, 
No  reach,  no  breach,  that  might  him  profit  bring, 
But  he  the  same  did  to  his  purpose  wring. 
Nought  suffered  he  the  Ape  to  give  or  graunt, 
But  through  his  hand  must  passe  the  Fiaunt. 


76 


SPENSER. 


He  chaffred  Chayres  in  which  Churchmen  were  set^, 

And  breach  of  lawes  to  privie  ferme  did  let ; 

No  statute  so  established  might  bee, 

Nor  ordinaunce  so  needfull,  but  that  hee 

Would  violate,  though  not  with  violence, 

Yet  under  colour  of  the  confidence 

The  which  the  Ape  repos'd  in  him  alone, 

And  reckned  him  the  kingdomes  corner-stone. 

And  ever,  when  he  ought  would  bring  to  pas, 

His  long  experience  the  platforme  was: 

And,  when  he  ought  not  pleasing  would  put  by 

The  cloke  was  care  of  thrift,  and  husbandry, 

For  to  encrease  the  common  treasures  store  ; 

But  his  owne  treasure  he  encreased  more, 

And  lifted  up  his  loftie  towres  thereby, 

That  they  began  to  threat  the  neighbour  sky ; 

The  whiles  the  Princes  pallaces  fell  fast 

To  mine  (for  what  thing  can  ever  last?) 

And  whilest  the  other  Peeres,  for  povertie, 

Were  forst  their  auncient  houses  to  let  lie, 

And  their  olde  Castles  to  the  ground  to  fall, 

Which  their  forefathers,  famous  over-all, 

Had  founded  for  the  Kingdome's  ornament, 

And  for  their  memories  long  moniment. 

But  he  no  count  made  of  Nobilitie, 

Nor  the  wilde  beasts  whom  armes  did  glorifie. 

The  Realmes  chiefe  strenpjth  and  girlond  of  the  crowns. 

All  these  through  fained  crimes  he  thrust  adowne, 

Or  made  them  dwell  in  darknes  of  disgrace ; 

For  none,  but  whom  he  list,  might  come  in  place. 

"  Of  men  of  armes  he  had  but  small  regard, 
But  kept  them  lowe,  and  streigned  verie  hard. 
For  men  of  learning  little  he  esteemed ; 
His  wisdome  he  above  their  learning  deemed 
As  for  the  rascall  Commons,  least  he  cared, 
For  not  so  common  was  his  bountie  shared. 
Let  God,  (said  he)  if  please,  care  for  the  manie, 
I  for  my  selfe  must  care  before  els  anie. 
So  did  he  good  to  none,  to  manie  ill. 
So  did  he  all  the  kingdome  rob  and  pill ; 
Yet  none  durst  speake,  ne  none  durst  of  him  plaine, 
So  great  he  was  in  grace,  and  rich  through  gaine. 
Ne  would  he  anie  let  to  have  accesse 
Unto  the  Prince,  but  by  his  own  addresse, 
For  all  that  els  did  come  were  sure  to  faile." 

Even  at  Court,  however,  the  poet  finds  a  contrast  to  all  this  •  he 
had  known  Philip  Sidney,  and  Raleigh  was  his  friend. 

Yet  the  brave  Courtier,  in  whose  beauteous  thought 

Regard  of  honour  harbours  more  than  ought, 

Doth  loath  such  base  condition,  to  backbite 

Anies  good  name  for  envie  or  despite : 

He  stands  on  tearmes  of  honourable  minde, 

Ne  will  be  carried  with  the  common  winde 


SPENSER. 


77 


Of  Courts  inconstant  mutabilitie, 

Ne  after  everie  tattling  fable  flic  ; 

But  heares  and  sees  the  follies  of  the  rest, 

And  thereof  gathers  for  himselfe  the  best. 

He  will  not  creepe,  nor  crouche  with  fained  face, 

But  walkes  upright  with  comely  stedfast  pace, 

And  unto  all  doth  yeeld  due  courtesie  ; 

But  not  with  kissed  hand  belowe  the  knee, 

As  that  same  Apish  crue  is  wont  to  doo : 

For  he  disdaines  himselfe  t'  embase  theretoo. 

He  hates  fowle  leasings,  and  vile  flatterie, 

Two  filthie  blots  in  noble  gentrie ; 

And  lothefull  idlenes  he  doth  detest, 

The  canker  worme  of  everie  gentle  brest, 

^  Or  lastly,  when  the  bodie  list  to  pause, 
His  mind  unto  the  Muses  he  withdrawes  : 
Sweete  Ladie  Muses,  Ladies  of  delight. 
Delights  of  life,  and  ornaments  of  light  I 
With  whom  he  close  confers  with  wise  discourse, 
Of  Natures  workes,  of  heavens  continuall  course, 
Of  forreine  lands,  of  people  different, 
Of  kingdomes  change,  of  divers  gouvernment, 
Of  dreadful!  battailes  of  renowned  Knights  ; 
With  which  he  kindleth  his  ambitious  sprights 
To  like  desire  and  praise  of  noble  fame, 
The  onely  upshot  whereto  he  doth  ayme : 
For  all  his  minde  on  honour  fixed  is, 
To  which  he  levels  all  his  purposis, 
And  in  his  Princes  service  spends  his  dayes, 
Not  so  much  for  to  gaine,  or  for  to  raise 
Himselfe  to  high  degree,  as  for  his  grace. 
And  in  his  liking  to  winne  worthie  place, 
Through  due  deserts  and  comely  carriage." 

The  fable  also  throws  light  on  the  way  in  which  Spenser  re- 
garded the  religious  parties,  whose  strife  was  becoming  loud  and 
threatening.  Spenser  is  often  spoken  of  as  a  Puritan.  He  cer- 
tainly had  the  Puritan  hatred  of  Rome :  and  in  the  Church  system 
as  it  existed  in  England  he  saw  many  instances  of  ignorance,  lazi- 
ness, and  corruption ;  and  he  agreed  with  the  Puritans  in  denounc- 
ing them.  His  pictures  of  the  "formal  priest,'*  with  his  excuses 
for  doing  nothing,  his  new-fashioned  and  improved  substitutes  for 
the  ornate  and  also  too  lengthy  ancient  service,  and  his  general 
ideas  of  self-complacent  comfort,  has  in  it  an  odd  mixture  of  Roman 
Catholic  irony  with  Puritan  censure.  Indeed,  though  Spenser 
hated  with  an  Englishman's  hatred  all  that  he  considered  Roman 
superstition  and  tyranny,  he  had  a  sense  of  the  poetical  impressive- 
ness  of  the  old  ceremonial,  and  the  ideas  which  cluno;  to  it — its 
pomp,  its  beauty,  its  suj^gestiveness — very  far  removed  from  the 
iconoclastic  temper  of  the  Puritans.  In  his  View  of  the  State  of 
Ireland^  he  notes  as  a  sign  of  its  evil  condition  the  state  of  the 
churches,  "most  of  them  ruined  and  even  with  the  ground,"  and 


78  SPENSER. 

the  rest  "  so  unhandsomely  patched  and  thatched,  that  men  do 
even  shun  the  places,  for  the  uncomeliness  thereof.''  **The  out- 
ward form  (assure  yourself),"  he  adds,  "  doth  greatly  draw  the 
rude  people  to  the  reverencing  and  frequenting  thereof,  whatever 
some  of  our  late  too  nice  fools  may  say,  that  there  is  nothing  in  the 
seemly  form  and  comely  order  of  the  church." 

"  *  Ah  !  but  (said  th'  Ape)  the  charge  is  wondrous  great, 
To  feede  mens  soules,  and  hath  an  heavie  threat.' 
*  To  feed  mens  soules  (quoth  he)  is  not  in  man  ; 
For  they  must  feed  themselves,  doo  what  we  can. 
We  are  but  charged  to  lay  the  meate  before : 
Bate  they  that  list,  we  need  to  doo  no  more. 
But  God  it  is  that  feeds  them  with  his  grace, 
The  bread  of  life  powr'd  downe  from  heavenly  place 
Therefore  said  he,  that  with  the  budding  rod 
Did  rule  the  Jewes,  All  shalbe  tcaight  of  God. 
That  same  hath  Jesus  Christ  now  to  him  raught, 
By  w^hom  the  flock  is  rightly  fed,  and  taught : 
He  is  the  Shepheard,  and  the  Priest  is  hee ; 
We  but  his  shepheard  swaines  ordain'd  to  bee. 
Therefore  herewith  doo  not  your  selfe  dismay; 
Ne  is  the  paines  so  great,  but  bcare  ye  may, 
For  not  so  great,  as  it  was  wont  of  yore. 
It's  now  a  dayes,  ne  halfe  so  streight  and  sore. 
They  whilome  used  duly  everie  day 
Their  service  and  their  holie  things  to  say, 
At  morne  and  even,  besides  their  Anthemes  sweets. 
Their  penie  Masses,  and  their  Complynes  meetc, 
Their  Diriges,  their  Trentals,  and  their  shrifts. 
Their  memories,  their  singings,  and  their  gifts. 
Now  all  those  necdlesse  works  are  laid  away ; 
Now  once  a  weeke,  upon  the  Sabbath  day, 
It  is  enough  to  doo  our  small  devotion, 
And  then  to  follow  any  merrie  modon. 
Ne  are  we  tyde  to  fast,  but  when  we  list ; 
Ne  to  weare  garments  base  of  wollen  twist, 
But  with  the  finest  silkes  us  to  aray. 
That  before  God  we  may  appeare  more  gay, 
Resembling  Aarons  glorie  in  his  place: 
For  farre  unfit  it  is,  that  person  bace  ^  ^ 

Should  with  vile  cloaths  approach  Gods  majestie 
Whom  no  uncleannes  mav  approachen  nie; 
Or  that  all  men,  which  anic  master  serve, 
Good  garments  for  their  service  should  deserve  ; 
But  he  that  serves  the  Lord  of  hoasts  most  high, 
And  that  in  highest  place,  t'  approach  him  nigh, 
And  all  the  peoples  prayers  to  present 
Before  his  throne,  as  on  ambassage  sent 
Both  too  and  fro,  should  not  deserve  to  weare 
A  garment  better  than  of  wooll  or  heare. 
Beside,  we  may  have  Iving  by  our  sides^ 
Our  lovely  Lasses,  or  bright  shining  Brides: 
We  be  not  tyde  to  wilfull  chastitie. 
But  have'the  Gospel!  of  free  libertie." 


SPENSER. 


79 


fiut  his  weapon  is  double-edged,  and  he  had  not  much  more 
love  for 

"  That  ungracious  crew  which  feigns  demurest  grace/' 

The  first  prescription  which  the  Priest  gives  to  the  Fox  who 
desires  to  rise  to  preferment  in  the  Church  is  to  win  the  favour  of 
some  great  Puritan  noble. 

"  First,  therefore,  when  ye  have  in  handsome  wise 
Your  selfe  attyred,  as  you  can  devise, 
Then  to  some  Noble-man  your  selfe  applye, 
Or  other  great  one  in  the  worldes  eye, 
That  hath  a  zealous  disposition 
To  God,  and  so  to  his  religion. 
There  must  thou  fashion  eke  a  godly  zeale, 
Such  as  no  carpers  may  contrayre  reveale ; 
For  each  thing  fained  ought  more  warie  bee. 
There  thou  must  walke  in  sober  gravitee. 
And  seeme  as  Saintlike  as  Sainte  Radegund  : 
Fast  much,  pray  oft,  looke  lowly  on  the  ground, 
And  unto  everie  one  doo  curtesie  meeke  : 
These  lookes  (nought  saying)  doo  a  benefice  seeke, 
And  be  thou  sure  one  not  to  lack  or  long.'' 

But  he  is  impartial,  and  points  out  that  there  are  other  ways  of 
rising — by  adopting  the  fashions  of  the  Court,  "facing,  and  forg- 
ing, and  scoffing,  and  crouching  to  please,"  and  so  to  "  mock  out  a 
benefice  ;  "  or  else,  by  compounding  with  a  patron  to  give  him  half 
the  profits,  and  in  the  case  of  a  bishopric,  to  submit  to  the  aliena- 
tion of  its  manors  to  some  powerful  favourite,  as  the  Bishop  of  Sal- 
isbury had  to  surrender  Sherborn  to  Sir  Walter  Raleigh.  Spen- 
ser, in  his  dedication  of  Mother  HtibbercVs  Tale  to  one  of  the 
daughters  of  Sir  John  Spencer,  Lady  Compton  and  Monteagle 
speaks  of  it  as  "  long  sithence  composed  in  the  raw  conceit  of  youth 
But,  whatever  this  may  mean,  and  it  was  his  way  thus  to  deprecate 
severe  judgments,  his  allowing  the  publication  of  it  at  this  time, 
shows,  if  the  work  itself  did  not  show  it,  that  he  was  in  very  serious 
earnest  in  his  bitter  sarcasms  on  the  base  and  evil  arts  which  brought 
success  at  the  Court. 

He  stayed  in  England  about  a  year  and  a  half  [i  590-91],  long 
enough,  apparently,  to  make  up  his  mind  that  he  had  not  much  to 
hope  for  from  his  great  friends,  Raleigh  and  perhaps  Essex,  who 
were  busy  on  their  own  schemes.  Raleigh,  from  whom  Spenser 
might  hope  most,  was  just  beginning  to  plunge  into  that  extraordi- 
nary career,  in  the  thread  of  which  glory  and  disgrace,  ar-sighted 
and  princely  public  spirit  and  insatiate  private  greed,  were  to  be  so 
strangely  intertwined.  In  1592  he  planned  the  great  adventure 
which  astonished  London  by  the  fabulous  plunder  of  the  Spanish 
treasure-ships  ;  in  the  same'  year  he  was  in  the  Tower,  under  the 
Queen's  displeasure  for  his  secret  marriage,  affecting  the  most 
ridiculous  despair  at  her  going  away  from  the  neighbourhood,  and 


8o 


SPEiVSER. 


pouring  forth  his  flatteries  on  this  old  woman  of  sixty  as  if  he  had 
no  bride  of  his  own  to  love  : — "  I  that  was  wont  to  behold  her  rid- 
ing like  Alexander,  hunting  like  Diana,  walking  like  Venus ;  the 
gentle  wind  blowing  her  fair  hair  about  her  pure  cheeks  like  a 
nymph  ;  sometimes,  sitting  in  the  shade  like  a  goddess  ;  sometimes, 
singing  like  an  angel;  sometimes,  playing  like  Orpheus — behold  the 
sorrow  of  this  world — once  amiss,  hath  bereaved  me  of  all."  Then 
came  the  exploration  of  Guiana,  the  expedition  to  Cadiz,  the  Island 
voyage  [  1 595-1 597].  Raleigh  had  something  else  to  do  than  to 
think  of  Spenser's  fortunes. 

Spenser  turned  back  once  more  to  Ireland,  to  his  clerkship  of 
the  Council  of  Munster,  which  he  soon  resigned  ;  to  be  worried 
with  lawsuits  about  "  lands  in  Shanbally-more  and  Ballingrath,"  by 
his  time-serving  and  oppressive  Irish  neighbour,  Maurice  Roche, 
Lord  Fermoy ;  to  brood  still  over  his  lost  ideal  and  hero,  Sidney; 
to  write  the  story  of  his  visit  in  the  pastoral  supplement  to  the 
Shepherd's  Calendar^  Colin  Cloufs  co?ne  home  again;  to  pursue 
the  story  of  Gloriana's  knights  ;  and  to  find  among  the  Irish  maidens 
another  Elizabeth,  a  wife  instead  of  a  queen,  whose  wooing  and 
winning  were  to  give  new  themes  to  his  imagination. 


CHAPTER  V. 

THE  FAERIE  QUEENE. 

"  Uncouth  [=unknown],  ttnkist^''  are  the  words  from  Chaucer,* 
with  which  the  friend,  who  introduced  Spenser's  earh'est  poetry  to 
the  world,  bespeaks  forbearance,  and  promises  matter  for  admira- 
tion and  dehght  in  the  Shepherd^s  Calendar.  "  You  have  to  know 
my  new  poet,"  he  says  in  effect  :  "and  when  you  have  learned  his 
ways,  you  will  find  how  much  you  have  to  honour  and  love  him." 
"  I  doubt  not,"  he  says,  with  a  boldness  of  prediction,  manifestly 
sincere,  which  is  remarkable  about  an  unknown  man,  "  that  so 
soon  as  his  name  shall  come  into  the  knowledge  of  men,  and  his 
worthiness  be  sounded  in  the  trump  of  fame,  but  that  he  shall  be 
not  only  kissed,  but  also  beloved  of  all,  embraced  of  the  most, 
and  wondered  at  of  the  best."  Never  was  prophecy  more  rapidly 
and  more  signally  verified,  probably  beyond  the  prophet's  largest 
expectation.  But  he  goes  on  to  explain  and  indeed  apologise  for 
certain  features  of  the  new  poet's  work,  which  even  lo  readers  of 
that  day  might  seem  open  to  exception.  And  to  readers  of  to-day, 
the  phrase,  uncouth^  unkist^  certainly  expresses  what  many  have 
to  confess,  if  they  are  honest,  as  to  their  first  acquaintance 
with  the  Faerie  Queene.  Its  place  in  literature  is  established  be3'ond 
controversy.  Yet  its  first  and  unfamiliar  aspect  inspires  respect, 
perhaps  interest,  rather  than  attracts  and  satisfies.  It  is  not  the 
remoteness  of  the  subject  alone,  nor  the  distance  of  three  centuries 
which  raises  a  bar  between  it  and  those  to  whom  it  is  new.  Shake- 
spere  becomes  familiar  to  us  from  the  first  moment.  The  impossible 
legends  of  Arthur  have  been  made  in  the  language  of  to-day  once 
more  to  touch  our  sympathies,  and  have  lent  themselves  to  express 
our  thoughts.  But  at  first  acquaintance  the  Faerie  Queene  to  many 
of  us  has  been  disappointing.  It  has  seemed  not  only  antique,  but 
artificial.  It  has  seemed  fantastic.  It  has  seemed,  we  cannot 
help  avowing,  tiresome.  It  is  not  till  the  early  appearances  have 
worn  off,  and  we  have  learned  to  make  many  allowances  and  to 
surrender  ourselves  to  the  feelings  and  the  standards  by  which  it 
claims  to  affect  and  govern  us,  that  we  really  find  under  what 

*•  Unknow,  unkyst  ;  and  lost,  that  is  unsoght. 

'J'royhis  and  Cry  side  ^  lib.  i, 

6 


82 


SPENSER. 


noble  guidance  ^Ye  are  proceeding,  and  what  subtle  and  varied 
spells  are  ever  round  us. 

I.  The  Faerie  Queene  is  the  work  of  an  unformed  literature, 
the  product  of  an  unperfected  art.  English  poetry,  English 
language,  in  Spenser's,  nay  in  Shakespere's  day,  had  much  to  learn, 
much  to  unlearn.  They  never,  perhaps,  have  been  stronger  or 
richer,  than  in  that  marvellous  burst  of  youth,  with  all  its  freedom 
of  invention,  of  observation,  of  reflection.  But  they  had  not  that 
which  only  the  experience  and  practice  of  eventful  centuries  could 
give  them.  Even  genius  must  wait  for  the  gifts  of  time.  It  can- 
not forerun  the  limitations  of  its  day,  nor  anticipate  the  conquests 
and  common  possessions  of  the  future.  Things  are  impossible  to 
the  first  great  masters  of  art  which  are  easy  to  their  second-rate 
successors.  The  possibility,  or  the  necessity  of  breaking  through 
some  convention,  of  attempting  some  unattempted  effort,  had  not, 
among  other  great  enterprises,  occurred  to  them.  They  were 
laying  the  steps  in  a  magnificent  fashion  on  which  those  after 
them  were  to  rise.  But  we  ought  not  to  shut  our  eyes  to  mistakes 
or  faults  to  which  attention  had  not  yet  been  awakened,  or  for 
avoiding  which  no  reasonable  means  had  been  found.  To  learn 
from  genius,  we  must  try  to  recognize  both  what  is  still  imperfect 
and  what  is  grandly  and  unwontedly  successful.  There  is  no 
great  work  of  art,  not  excepting  even  the  Iliad  or  the  Parthenon, 
which  is  not  open,  especially  in  point  of  ornament,  to  the  scoff  of 
the  scoffer,  or  to  the  injustice  of  those  who  do  not  mind  being 
unjust.  But  all  art  belongs  to  man  ;  and  man,  even  when  he  is 
greatest,  is  always  limited  and  imperfect. 

The  Fae}'ie  Qiieene,  as  a  whole,  bears  on  its  face  a  great  fault 
of  construction.  It  carries  with  it  no  adequate  account  of  its  own 
story ;  it  does  not  explain  itself,  or  contain  in  its  own  structure 
what  would  enable  a  reader  to  understand  how  it  arose.  It  has  to 
be  accounted  for  by  a  prose  explanation  and  key  outside  of  itself. 
The  poet  intended  to  reserve  the  central  event,  which  was  the 
occasion  of  all  the  adventures  of  the  poem,  till  they  had  all  been 
related,  leaving  them  as  it  were  in  the  air,  till  at  the  end  of  twelve 
long  books  the  reader  should  at  last  be  told  how  the  whole  thing 
had  originated,  and  what  it  was  all  about.  He  made  the  mistake 
of  confounding  the  answer  to  a  riddle  with  the  crisis  which  unties 
the  tangle  of  a  plot  and  satisfies  the  suspended  interest  of  a  tale. 
None  of  the  great  model  poems  before  him,  however  full  of 
digression  and  episode,  had  failed  to  arrange  their  story  with 
clearness.  They  needed  no  commentary  outside  themselves  to 
say  why  they  began  as  they  did,  and  out  of  what  antecedents  they 
arose.  If  they  started  at  once  from  the  middle  of  things,  they 
made  their  story,  as  it  unfolded  itself,  explain  by  more  or  less 
skilful  devices,  all  that  needed  to  be  known  about  their  beginnings. 
They  did  not  think  of  rules  of  art.  They  did  of  themselves  natu- 
rally what  a  good  story-teller  does,  to  make  himself  intelligible  and 
interesting;  and  it  is  not  easy  to  be  interesting,  unless  the  parts  of 
the  story  are  in  their  place. 


SPENSER. 


83 


The  defect  seems  to  have  come  upon  Spenser  wlien  it  was  too 
late  to  remedy  it  in  the  construction  of  his  poem  ;  and  he  adopted 
the  somewhat  clumsy  expedient  of  telling  us  what  the  poem  itself 
ought  to  have  told  us  of  its  general  story,  in  a  letter  to  Sir  Walter 
Raleigh.  Raleigh  himself,  indeed,  suggested  the  letter  :  apparently 
(from  the  date,  Jan.  23,  1590),  after  the  first  part  had  gone  through 
the  press.  And  without  this  after-thought,  as  the  twelfth  book 
was  never  reached,  we  should  have  been  left  to  gather  the  outline 
and  plan  of  the  story,  from  imperfect  glimpses  and  allusions,  as 
we  have  to  fill  up  from  hints  and  assumptions  the  gaps  of  an 
unskilful  narrator,  who  leaves  out  what  is  essential  to  the  under- 
standing of  his  tale. 

Incidentally,  however,  this  letter  is  an  advantage  :  for  we  have 
in  it  the  poet's  own  statement  of  his  purpose  in  writing,  as  well 
as  a  necessary  sketch  of  his  story.  His  allegory,  as  he  had  ex- 
plained to  Bryskett  and  his  friends,  had  a  moral  purpose.  He 
meant  to  shadow  forth,  under  the  figures  of  twelve  knights,  and  in 
their  various  exploits,  the  characteristics  of  a  gentleman  or  noble 
person,"  "fashioned  in  virtuous  and  gentle  discipline."  He  took 
his  machinery  from  the  popular  legends  about  King  Arthur,  and 
his  heads  of  moral  philosophy  from  the  current  Aristotelian  cata- 
logue of  the  Schools. 


"  Sir,  knowing  how  doubtfully  all  Allegories  may  be  construed,  and 
this  booke  of  mine,  which  I  have  entituled  the  Faerie  Queene,  being  a 
continued  Allegory,  or  darke  conceit,  I  haue  thought  good,  as  well  for 
avoyding  of  gealous  opinions  and  misconstructions,  as  also  for  your  better 
light  in  reading  thereof  (being  so  by  you  commanded),  to  discover  unto 
you  the  general  intention  and  meaning,  which  in  the  whole  course  thereof 
I  have  fashioned,  without  expressing  of  any  particular  purposes,  or  by 
accidents,  therein  occasioned.  The  generall  end  therefore  of  all  the  booke 
is  to  fashion  a  gentleman  or  noble  person  in  vertuous  and  gentle  discipline  : 
Which  for  that  I  conceived  shoulde  be  most  plausible  and  pleasing,  being 
coloured  with  an  historical!  fiction,  the  which  the  most  part  of  men  delight 
to  read,  rather  for  variety  of  matter  then  for  profite  of  the  ensample,  I 
chose  the  historye  of  King  Arthure,  as  most  fitte  for  the  excellency  of  his 
person,  being  made  famous  by  many  mens  former  workes,  and  also  fur- 
thest from  the  daunger  of  envy,  and  suspition  of  present  time.  In  which  I 
have  followed  all  the  antique  Poets  historical!  ;  first  Homere,  who  in  the 
Persons  of  Agamemnon  and  Ulysses  hath  ensam.pled  a  good  governour 
and  a  vertuous  man,  the  one  in  his  Ilias,  the  other  in  his  Odysseis  :  then 
Virgil,  whose  like  intention  was  to  doe  in  the  person  of  Aeneas  :  after  him 
Ariosto comprised  them  both  in  his  Orlando:  and  lately Tasso  dissevered 
them  againe,  and  formed  both  parts  in  two  persons^  namely  that  part 
which  they  in  Philosophy  call  Ethice,  or  vertues  of  a  private  man,  coloured 
in  his  Rinaldo  ;  the  other  named  Politice  in  his  Godfredo.  By  ensample 
of  which  excellente  Poets,  I  labour  to  pourtraict  in  Arthure,'  before  he 
was  king,  the  image  of  a  brave  knight,  perfected  in  the  twelve  private 
morall  vertues,  as  Aristotle  hath  devised;  the  which  is  the  purpose  of 
these  first  twelve  bookes  :  which  if  I  finde  to  be  well  accepted,  I 'may  be 
perhaps  encoraged  toframe  the  other  part  of  polliticke  vertues  in  his  per- 
son, after  that  hee  came  to  be  king," 


84 


SPENSER. 


Then,  after  explaining  that  he  meant  the  Faerie  Qiceene  "fof 
glory  in  general  intention,  but  in  particular  "  for  Elizabeth,  and  his 
Faerie  Land  for  her  kingdom,  he  proceeds  to  explain,  what  the  first 
three  books  hardly  explain,  what  the  Faerie  Oueene  had  to  do  with 
the  structure  of  the  poem. 

"  But,  because  the  beginning  of  the  whole  worke  seemeth  abrupte,  and 
as  depending  upon  other  antecedents,  it  needs  that  ye  know  the  occasion 
of  these  three  knights  seuerall  adventures.  For  the  Methode  of  a  Poet 
historical  is  not  such,  as  of  an  Historiographer.  For  an  Historiographer 
discourseth  of  affayres  orderly  as  they  were  donne,  accounting  as  well  the 
times  as  the  actions ;  but  a  Poet  thrusteth  into  the  middest,  even  where  it 
most  concerneth  him,  and  there  recoursing  to  the  thinges  forepaste,  and 
divining  of  thinges  to  come,  maketh  a  pleasing  Analysis  of  all. 

The  beginning  therefore  of  my  history,  if  it  were  to  be  told  by  an 
Historiographer  should  be  the  twelfth  booke,  which  is  the  last ;  where  1 
devise  that  the  Faerie  Queene  kept  her  Annuall  feaste  xii.  dayes ;  uppon 
which  xii.  severall  dayes,  the  occasions  of  the  xii.  severall  adventures 
h  ipned,  which,  being  undertaken  by  xii.  severall  knights,  are  in  these  xii. 
books  severally  handled  and  discoursed.  The  first  was  this.  In  the  be- 
ginning of  the  feast,  there  presented  him  selfe  a  tall  clownishe  younge 
man,  who  falling  before  the  Queene  of  Faeries  desired  a  boone  (as  the 
manner  then  was)  which  during  that  feast  she  might  not  refuse ;  which 
was  that  hee  might  have  the  atchievement  of  any  adventure,  which  during 
that  feaste  should  happen  ;  that  being  graunted,  he  rested  him  on  the  floore, 
unfitte  through  his  rusticity  for  a  better  place.  Soone  after  entred  a 
faire  Ladye  in  mourning  weedes,  riding  on  a  white  Asse,  with  a  dwarf e 
behinde  her  leading  a  warlike  steed,  that  bore  the  Armes  of  a  knight,  and 
his  speare  in  the  dwarfes  hand.  Shee,  falling  before  the  Queene  of 
Faeries,  complayned  that  her  father  and  mother,  an  ancient  King  and 
Queene,  had  beene  by  an  huge  dragon  many  years  shut  up  in  a  brasen 
Castle,  who  thence  suffred  them  not  to  yssew  ;  and  therefore  besought 
the  Faerie  Queene  to  assygne  her  some  one  of  her  knights  to  take  on 
him  that  exployt.  Presently  that  clownish  person,  upstarting,  desired 
that  adventure ;  whereat  the  Queene  much  wondering,  and  the  Lady 
much  gainesaying,  yet  he  earnestly  importuned  his  desire.  In  the  end 
the  Lady  told  him,  that  unlesse  that  armour  which  she  brought  would 
serve  him  (that  is,  the  armour  of  a  Christian  man  specified  by  Saint  Paul, 
vi.  Ephes.)  that  he  could  not  succeed  in  that  enterprise;  which  being 
forthwith  put  upon  him,  with  dewe  furnitures  thereunto,  he  seemed  the 
goodliest  man  in  al  that  company,  and  was  well  liked  of  the  Lady.  And 
eftesoones  taking  on  him  knighthood,  and  mounting  on  that  straunge 
courser,  he  went  forth  with  her  on  that  adventure :  where  beginneth 
the  first  booke,  viz. 

"A  gentle  knight  was  pricking  on  the  playne,  &c." 

That  it  was  not  without  reason  that  this  explanatory  key  was  pre- 
fixed to  the  work,  and  that  either  Spenser  or  Raleigh  felt  it  to 
be  almost  indispensable,  appears  from  the  concluding  paragraph. 

Thus  much.  Sir,  I  have  briefly  overronne  to  direct  your  understand- 
ing to  the  wel-head  of  the  History ;  that  from  thence  gathering  the  whole 
intention  of  the  conceit,  ye  may  as  in  a  handfull  gripe  al  the  discourse, 
which  otherwise  may  liappily  seeme  tedious  and  confused." 


SPENSER. 


8S 


According  to  the  plan  thus  sketched  out,  wc  have  but  a  frag- 
ment of  the  work.  It  was  published  in  two  parcels,  each  of  three 
books,  in  1590  and  1596;  and  after  his  death  two  cantos,  with  two 
stray  stanzas,  of  a  seventh  book  were  found  and  printed.  Each 
perfect  book  consists  of  twelve  cantos  of  from  thirty-five  to  sixty 
of  his  nine-line  stanzas.  The  books  published  in  1590  contain,  as 
he  states  in  his  prefatory  letter,  the  legends  of  Holiness^  of  Tem- 
perance^ and  of  Chastity.  Those  published  in  1 596  contain  the 
legends  of  Friendships  of  Justice  and  of  Courtesy.  The  posthu- 
mous cantos  are  entitled,  Of  Mutability^  and  are  said  to  be  appar- 
ently parcel  of  a  legend  of  Constancy.  The  poem  which  was  to 
treat  of  the  "  politic  "  virtues  was  never  approached.  Thus  we  have 
but  a  fourth  part  of  the  whole  of  the  projected  work.  It  is  very 
doubtful  whether  the  remaining  six  books  were  completed.  But  it 
is  probable  that  a  portion  of  them  was  written,  which,  except  the 
cantos  On  Mutability ^  has  perished.  And  the  intended  titles  or 
legends  of  the  later  books  have  not  been  preserved. 

Thus  the  poem  was  to  be  an  allegorical  story ;  a  story  branch- 
ing out  into  twelve  separate  stories,  which  themselves  would  branch 
out  again  and  involve  endless  other  stories.  It  is  a  complex 
scheme  to  keep  well  in  hand,  and  Spenser's  art  in  doing  so  has 
been  praised  by  some  of  his  critics.  But  the  art,  if  there  is  any,  is 
so  subtle  that  it  fails  to  save  the  reader  from  perplexity.  The  truth 
is  that  the  power  of  ordering  and  connecting  a  long  and  complicated 
plan  was  not  one  of  Spenser's  gifts.  In  the  first  two  books,  the 
allegorical  story  proceeds  from  point  to  point  with  fair  coherence 
and  consecutiveness.  After  them  the  attempt  to  hold  the  scheme 
together,  except  in  the  loosest  and  most  general  way,  is  given  up 
as  too  troublesome  or  too  confined.  The  poet  prefixes,  indeed,  the 
name  of  a  particular  virtue  to  each  book,  but  with  slender  reference 
to  it,  he  surrenders  himself  freely  to  his  abundant  flow  of  ideas, 
and  to  whatever  fancy  or  invention  tempts  him,  and  ranges  unre- 
strained over  the  whole  field  of  knowledge  and  imagination.  In 
the  first  two  books,  the  allegory  is  transparent,  and  the  story  con- 
nected. The  allegory  is  of  the  nature  of  the  Pilgrini's  Prog7^ess. 
It  starts  from  the  belief  that  religion,  purified  from  falsehood, 
superstition,  and  sin,  is  the  foundation  of  all  nobleness  in  man; 
and  it  portrays,  under  images  and  with  names,  for  the  most  part 
easily  understood,  and  easily  applied  to  real  counterparts,  the 
struggle  w^hich  every  one  at  that  time  supposed  to  be  going  on, 
between  absolute  truth  and  righteousness  on  one  side,  and  fatal 
error  and  bottomless  wickedness  on  the  other.  Una,  the  Truth, 
the  one  and  only  Bride  of  man's  spirit,  marked  out  by  the  tokens 
of  humility  and  innocence,  a^^d  by  her  power  over  wild  and  untamed 
natures — the  single  Truth,  m  contrast  to  the  counterfeit  Duessa, 
false  religion,  and  its  actual  embodiment  in  the  false  rival  Queen 
of  Scots — Truth,  the  object  of  passionate  homage,  real  with  many, 
professed  with  all,  which  after  the  impostures  and  scandals  of  the 
preceding  age,  had  now  become  characteristic  of  that  of  Elizabeth 
— Truth,  its  claims,  its  dangers,  and  its  champions,  are  the  subject 


86 


SPENSER. 


of  the  first  book :  and  it  is  represented  as  leading  the  manhood  of 
England,  in  spite  not  only  of  terrible  conflict,  but  of  defeat  and  falls, 
through  the  discipline  oi  repentance,  to  holiness  and  the  blessed- 
ness which  comes  with  it.  The  Red  Cross  Knight,  St.  George  of 
England,  whose  name  Georgos,  the  Ploughman,  is  dwelt  upon, 
apparently  to  suggest  that  from  the  commonalty,  the  "  tall  clownish 
young  men,"  were  raised  up  the  great  champions  of  the  Truth — 
though  sorely  troubled  by  the  wiles  of  Duessa,  by  the  craft  of  the 
arch-sorcerer,  by  the  force  and  pride  of  the  great  powers  of  the 
Apocalyptic  Beast  and  Dragon,  finally  overcomes  them,  and  wins 
the  deliverance  of  Una  and  her  love. 

The  second  book.  Of  Temper'ance,  pursues  the  subject,  and  rep- 
resents the  internal  conquests  of  self-mastery,  the  conquests  of  a 
man  over  his  passions,  his  violence,  his  cove tousness,  his  ambition, 
his  despair,  his  sensuality.  Sir  Guyon,  after  conquering  many  foes 
of  goodness,  is  the  destroyer  of  the  most  perilous  of  them  all, 
Acrasia,  licentiousness,  and  her  ensnaring  Bower  of  Bliss.  But 
after  this,  the  thread  at  once  of  story  and  allegory,  slender  hence- 
forth at  the  best,  is  neglected  and  often  entirely  lost.  The  third 
book,  the  Lege?td  of  Chastity,  is  a  repetition  of  the  ideas  of  the 
latter  part  of  the  second,  with  a  heroine,  Britomart,  in  place  of  the 
Knight  of  the  previous  book.  Sir  Guyon,  and  with  a  special  glorifi- 
cation of  the  high-flown  and  romantic  sentiments  about  purity, 
which  were  the  poetic  creed  of  the  courtiers  of  Elizabeth,  in  flagrant 
and  sometimes  in  tragic  contrast  to  their  practical  conduct  of  life. 
The  loose  and  ill-compacted  nature  of  the  plan  becomes  still  more 
evident  in  the  second  instalment  of  the  work.  Even  the  special 
note  of  each  particular  virtue  becomes  more  faint  and  indistinct. 
The  one  law  to  which  the  poet  feels  bound  is  to  have  twelve  cantos 
in  each  book ;  and  to  do  this  he  is  sometimes  driven  to  what  in 
later  times  has  been  called  padding.  One  of  the  cantos  of  the  third 
book  is  a  genealogy  of  British  kings  from  Geoffrey  of  Monmouth ; 
one  of  the  cantos  of  the  Legend  of  Friendship  is  made  up  of  an 
episode  describing  the  marriage  of  the  Thames  and  the  Medway, 
with  an  elaborate  catalogue  of  the  English  and  Irish  rivers,  and  the 
names  of  the  sea-nymphs.  In  truth,  he  had  exhausted  his  proper 
allegory,  or  he  got  tired  of  it.  His  poem  became  an  elastic  frame- 
work, into  which  he  could  fit  whatever  interested  him  and  tempted 
him  to  composition.  The  gravity  of  the  first  books  disappears.  He 
passes  into  satire  and  caricature.  We  meet  with  Braggadochio 
and  Trompart,  with  the  discomfiture  of  Malecasta,  with  the  conjugal 
troubles  of  Malbecco  and  Helenore,  with  the  imitation  from  Ariosto 
of  the  Squire  of  Dames.  He  puts  into  verse  a  poetical  physiology 
of  the  human  body  ;  he  translates  Lucretius,  and  speculates  on  the 
origin  of  human  souls  :  he  speculates,  too,  on  social  justice,  and 
composes  an  argumentative  refutation  of  the  Anabaptist  theories  of 
right  and  equality  among  men.  As  the  poem  proceeds,  he  seemF^ 
to  feel  himself  more  free  to  introduce  what  he  pleases.  Allusions 
to  real  men  and  events  are  sometimes  clear,  at  other  times  evident, 
though  they  have  now  ceased  to  be  intelligible  to  us.    His  disgust 


SPENSER. 


87 


and  resentment  breaks  out  at  the  ways  of  the  Court  in  sarcastic 
moralising,  or  in  pictures  of  dark  and  repulsive  imagery.  The 
characters  and  pictures  of  his  friends  furnish  material  for  his  poem; 
he  does  not  mind  touching  on  the  misadventures  of  Raleigh,  and 
even  of  Lord  Grey,  with  sly  humour  or  a  word  of  candid  advice. 
He  becomes  bolder  in  the  distinct  introduction  of  contemporary 
history.    The  defeat  of  Duessa  was  only  figuratively  shown  in  the 
first  portion  ;  in  the  second  the  subject  is  resumed.    As  Elizabeth 
is  the  ^'  one  form  of  many  names,"  Gloriana,  Belphoebe,  Britomart, 
Mercilla,  so,  "under  feigned  colours  shading  a  true  case,"  he  deals 
with  her  rival.    Mary  seems  at  one  time  the  false  Florimel,  the 
creature  of  enchantment,  stirring  up  strife,  and  fought  for  by  the 
foohsh  knights  whom  she  deceives,  Blandamour  and  Paridell,  the 
counterparts  of  Norfolk  and  the  intriguers  of  1571.    At  another, 
she  is  the  fierce  Amazonian  Queen,  Radegund,  by  whom,  for  a  mo- 
ment, even  Arthegal  is  brought  into  disgraceful  thraldom,  till  Brit- 
omart, whom  he  has  once  fought  against,  delivers  him.    And,  finally, 
the  fate  of  the  typical  Duessa  is  that  of  the  real  Mary  Queen  of 
Scots  described  in  great  detail — a  liberty  in  dealing  with  great 
affairs  of  State  for  which  James  of  Scotland  actually  desired  that 
he  should  be  tried  and  punished.*    So  Philip  II.  is  at  one  time  the 
Soldan,  at  another  the  Spanish  monster  Geryoneo,  at  another  the 
fosterer  of  Catholic  intrigues  in  France  and  Ireland,  Grantorto.  But 
real  names  are  also  introduced  with  scarcely  any  disguise;  Guizor, 
and  Burbon,  the  Knight  who  throws  away  his  shield,  Henry  IV., 
and  his  Lady  Flourdelis,  the  Lady  Beige,  and  her  seventeen  sons  : 
the  Lady  Irena,  whom  Arthegal  delivers.    The  overthrow  of  the 
Armada,  the  English  war  in  the  Low  Countries,  the  apostasy  of 
Henry  IV.,  the  deliverance  of  Ireland  from  the  "  great  wrong  "  of 
Desmond's  rebellion,  the  giant  Grantorto,  form,  under  more  or  less 
transparent  allegory,  great  part  of  the  Legerid  ofjtcstice.  Nay, 
Spenser's  long-fostered  revenge  on  the  lady  who  had  once  scorned 
him,  the  Rosali?td  oi  the  Shepherd^ s  Calenda?^  the  Mirabella  of  the 
Faerie  Queene,  and  his  own  late  and  happy  marriage  in  Ireland, 
are  also  brought  in  to  supply  materials  for  the  Legend  of  Courtesy, 
So  multifarious  is  the  poem,"  full  of  all  that  he  thought,  or  observed, 
or  felt;  a  receptacle,  without  much  care  to  avoid  repetition,  or  to 
prune,  correct,  and  condense,  for  all  the  abundance  of  his  ideas,  as 
they  welled  forth  in  his  mind  day  by  day.    It  is  really  a  collection 
of  separate  tales  and  allegories,  as  much  as  the  Ai^abian  Nights, 
or  as  its  counterpart  and  rival  of  our  own  century,  the  Idylls^  of  the 
Kin^.    As  a  whole,  it  is  confusing:  but  we  need  not  treat  it  as  a 
whole.    Its  continued  interest  soon  breaks  down.    But  it  is  prob- 
ably best  that  Spenser  gave  his  mind  the  vague  freedom  which 
suited  it,  and  that  he  did  not  make  efforts  to  tie  himself  down  to 
his  pre-arranged  but  too  ambitious  plan.    We  can  hardly  lose  our 
way  in  it,  for  there  is  no  way  to  lose.    It  is  a  wilderness  in  which 
we  are  left  to  wander.    But  there  may  be  interest  and  pleasure  in 
a  wilderness,  if  we  are  prepared  for  the  wandering. 

*  Hales'  Life,  Globe  Edition. 


88 


SPENSER. 


Still,  the  complexity,  or,  rather,  the  uncared-for  and  clumsy  an 
rangement  of  the  poern  is  a  matter  which  disturbs  a  reader's  satis- 
faction, till  he  gets  accustomed  to  the  poet's  way,  and  resigns  him- 
self to  it.  It  is  a  heroic  poem,  in  which  the  heroine,  who  gives  her 
name  to  it,  never  appears  :  a  story,  of  which  the  basis  and  starting- 
point  is  whimsically  withheld  for  disclosure  in  the  last  book,  which 
was  never  written.  If  Ariosto's  jumps  and  transitions  are  more  au« 
dacious,  Spenser's  intricacy  is  more  puzzling.  Adventures  begin 
which  have  no  finish.  Actors  in  them  drop  from  the  clouds,  claim 
an  mterest,  and  we  ask  in  vain  what  has  become  of  them.  A  vein 
of  what  are  manifestly  contemporary  allusions  breaks  across  the 
moral  drift  of  the  allegory,  with  an  apparently  distinct  yet  obscured 
meaning,  and  one  of  which  it  is  the  work  of  dissertations  to  find  the 
key.  The  passion  of  the  age  was  for  ingenious  riddling  in  morality 
as  in  love.  And  in  Spenser's  allegories  we  are  not  seldom  at  a  loss 
to  make  out  what  and  how  much  was  really  intended,  amid  a  maze 
of  over-strained  analogies  and  over-subtle  conceits,  and  attempts  to 
hinder  a  too  close  and  dangerous  identification. 

Indeed,  Spenser's  mode  of  allegory,  which  was  historical  as  well 
as  moral,  and  contains  a  good  deal  of  history,  if  we  knew  it,  often 
seems  devised  to  throw  curious  readers  off  the  scent.  It  was  pur- 
posely bafBing  and  hazy.  A  characteristic  trait  was  singled  out.  A 
name  was  transposed  in  anagram,  like  Irena,  or  distorted,  as  if  by 
imperfect  pronunciation,  like  Burbon  and  Arthegal,  or  invented  to 
express  a  quality,  like  Una,  or  Gloriana,  or  Corceca,  or  Fradubio, 
or  adopted  with  no  particular  reason  from  the  Morte  D' Arthur^  or 
any  other  old  Hterature.  The  personage  is  introduced  wito  some 
feature,  or  amid  circumstances  which  seem  for  a  moment  to  fix  the 
meaning.  But  when  we  look  to  the  sequence  of  history  being  kept 
up  in  the  sequence  of  the  story,  we  find  ourselves  thrown  out.  A 
character  which  fits  one  person  puts  on  the  marks  of  another :  a 
likeness  which  we  identify  with  one  real  person  passes  into  the  like- 
ness of  some  one  else.  The  real,  in  person,  incident,  institution, 
shades  off  in  the  ideal  ;  after  showing  itse.lf  by  plain  tokens,  it  turns 
aside  out  of  its  actual  path  of  fact,  and  ends,  as  the  poet  thinks  it 
ought  to  end,  in  victory  or  defeat,  glory  or  failure.  Prince  Arthur 
passes  from  Leicester  to  Sidney,  and  then  back  again  to  Leicester. 
There  are  double  or  treble  allegories ;  Elizabeth  is  Gloriana,  Bel- 
phoebe,  Britomart,  Mercilla,  perhaps  Amoret ;  her  rival  is  Duessa, 
the  false  Florimel,  probably  the  fierce  temptress,  the  Amazon  Rade- 
gund.  Thus,  what  for  a  moment  was  clear  and  definite,  fades  like 
tlie  changing  fringe  of  a  dispersing  cloud.  The  character  which 
we  identified  disappears  in  other  scenes  and  adventures,  where  we 
lose  sight  of  all  that  identified  it.  A  complete  transformation  de- 
stroys the  likeness  which  was  begun.  There  is  an  intentional  dis- 
location of  the  parts  of  the  story,  when  they  might  make  it  impru- 
dently close  in  its  reflection  of  facts  or  resemblance  in  portraiture. 
A  feature  is  shown,  a  manifest  allusion  made,  and  then  the  poet 
starts  oft  in  other  directions,  to  confus'j  and  perplex  all  attempts  at 
interpretation,  which  might  be  too  particular  and  too  certain.  This 


SPENSER. 


89 


was,  no  doubt,  merely  according  to  the  fashion  of  the  time,  and  the 
habits  of  mind  into  which  the  poet  had  grown.  But  there  were 
often  reasons  for  it,  in  an  age  so  suspicious,  and  so  dangerous  to 
those  who  meddled  with  high  matters  of  state. 

2.  Another  feature  which  is  on  the  surface  of  the  Faerie  Queene^ 
and  which  will  displease  a  reader  who  has  been  trained  to  value 
what  is  natural  and  genuine,  is  its  affectation  of  the  language  and 
the  customs  of  life  belonging  to  an  age  which  is  not  its  own.  It 
is,  indeed,  redolent  of  the  present ;  but  it  is  almost  avowedly  an 
imitation  of  what  was  current  in  the  days  of  Chaucer:  of  what 
were  supposed  to  be  the  words,  and  the  social  ideas  and  conditions.^ 
of  the  age  of  chivalry.  He  looked  back  to  the  fashions  and  ideas 
of  the  Middle  Ages,  as  Pindar  sought  his  materials  in  the  legends 
and  customs  of  the  Homeric  times,  and  created  a  revival  of  the 
spirit  of  the  age  of  the  Heroes  in  an  age  of  tyrants  and  incipient 
democracies.*  The  age  of  chivalry,  in  Spenser's  day  far  distant, 
had  yet  left  two  survivals,  one  real,  the  other  formal.  The  real 
survival  was  the  spirit  of  armed  adventure,  which  was  never  stronger 
or  more  stirring  than  in  the  gallants  and  discoverers  of  Elizabeth's 
reign,  the  captains  of  the  English  companies  in  the  Low  Coun- 
tries, the  audacious  sailors  who  explored  unknown  oceans  and 
plundered  the  Spaniards,  the  scholars  and  gentlemen  equally  ready 
for  work  on  sea  and  land,  hke  Raleigh  and  Sir  Richard  Grenville, 
of  the  "  Revenge."  The  formal  survival  was  the  fashion  of  keep- 
ing up  the  trappings  of  knightly  times,  as  we  keep  up  Judges' 
wigs,  court  dresses,  and  Lord  Mayors'  shows.  In  actual  life  it 
was  seen  in  pageants  and  ceremonies,  in  the  yet  lingering  parade 
of  jousts  a^d  tournaments,  in  the  knightly  accoutrements  still  worn 
in  the  days  of  the  bullet  and  the  cannon-ball.  In  the  apparatus 
of  the  poet,  as  all  were  shepherds  when  he  wanted  to  represent 
the  life  of  peace  and  letters,  so  all  were  knights,  or  the  foes  and 
victims  of  knights,  when  his  theme  was  action  and  enterprise.  It 
was  the  custom  that  the  Muse  masked,  to  use  Spenser's  word, 
under  these  disguises  ;  and  this  conventional  masquerade  of  pastoral 
poetry  or  knight-errantry  was  the  form  under  which  the  poetical 
school  that  preceded  the  dramatists  naturally  expressed  their  ideas. 
It  seems  to  us  odd  that  peaceful  sheepcots  and  love-sick  swains 
should  stand  for  the  world  of  the  Tudors  and  Guises,  or  that  its 
cunning  state-craft  and  relentless  cruelty  should  be  represented 
by  the  generous  follies  of  an  imaginary  chivalry.  But  it  was  the 
fashion  which  Spenser  found,  and  he  accepted  it.  His  genius 
was  not  of  that  sort  which  breaks  out  from  trammels,  but  of  that 
which  makes  the  best  of  what  it  finds.  And  whatever  we  may 
think  of  the  fashion,  at  least  he  gave  it  new  interest  and  splendour 
by  the  spirit  with  which  he  threw  himself  into  it. 

The  condition  which  he  took  as  the  groundwork  of  his  poetical 
fabric  suggested  the  character  of  his  language.  Chaucer  was  then 
the  "God  of  English  poetry ;  '  his  was  the  one  name  which  filled 


*  Vid.  Keble,  PrcBlect.  Acad.,  xxiv.  p.  479,  480. 


90 


SPENSEk. 


a  place  apart  in  the  history  of  English  verse.     Spenser  was  a 
student  of  Cliaucer,  and  borrowed  as  he  judged  fit,  not  only  from 
his  vocabulary,  but  from  his  grammatical  precedents  and  analogies, 
with  the  object  of  giving  an  appropriate  colouring  to  what  was 
to  be  raised  as  far  as  possible  above  familiar  life.    Besides  this, 
the  language  was  still  in  such  an  unsettled  state  that,  from  a  man 
with  resources  like  Spenser's,  it  naturally  invited  attempts  to  enrich 
and  colour  it,  to  increase  its  flexibility  and  power.    The  liberty 
of  reviving  old  forms,  of  adopting  from  the  language  of  the  street 
and  market  homely  but  expressive  words  or  combinations,  of  fol- 
lowing in  the  track  of  convenient  constructions,  of  venturing  on 
new  and  bold  phrases,  was  rightly  greater  in  his  time  than  at  a 
later  stage  of  the  language.    Many  of  his  words,  either  invented 
or  preserved,  are  happy  additions  ;  some  which  have  not  taken  root 
in  the  language,  we  may  regret.    But  it  was  a  liberty  which  he 
abused.    He  was  extravagant  and  unrestrained  in  his  experiments 
on  language.    And  they  were  made  not  merely  to  preserve  or  to 
invent  a  good  expression.    On  his  own  authority  he  cuts  down,  or 
he  alters  a  word,  or  he  adopts  a  mere  corrupt  pronunciation,  to 
suit  a  place  in  his  metre,  or  because  he  wants  a  rime.  Precedents, 
as  Mr.  Guest  has  said,  may  no  doubt  be  found  for  each  one  of 
these  sacrifices  to  the  necessities  of  metre  or  rime,  in  some  one  cr 
other  living  dialectic  usage,  or  even  in  printed  books — blend  for 
blind''  "  misleeke  "  for  "  i7tislike,'''    kesf'  for  "  cast,''  "  cherry  " 
for    cherish''  "  vilde  "  for,  "  vile,"  or  even    waives  "  for  ^'  waves," 
because  it  has  to  rime  to  "jaws,"     But  when  they  are  pro- 
fusely used  as  they  are  in  Spenser,  they  argue,  as  critics  of  his 
own  age,  such  as  Puttenham,  remarked,  either  want  of  trouble, 
or  want  of  resource.     In  his  impatience   he    is   reckless  in 
making  a  word  which  he  wants — "  fortunize,"  "  mercified,"  "  un- 
blindfold,"  "  relive  " — he  is  reckless  in  making  one  word  do  the  duty 
of  another,  interchanging  actives  and  passives,  transferring  epithets 
from  their  proper  subjects.    The  "humbled  grass,"  is  the  grass 
on  which  a  man  lies  humbled  :  the  "  lamentable  eye  "  is  the  eye 
which  laments.    "  His  treatment  of  words,"  says  Mr.  Craik,  "  on 
such  occasions" — occasions  of  difiiculty  to  his  verse — "is  like 
nothing  that  ever  was  seen,  unless  it  might  be  Hercules  breaking 
the  back  of  the  Nemean  lion.    He  gives  them  any  sense  and  any 
shape  that  the  case  may  demand.    Sometimes  he  merely  alters 
a  letter  or   two ;  sometimes  he  twists  off  the  head  or  the  tail 
of  the  unfortunate  vocable  altogether.     But  this  fearless,  lordly, 
truly  royal  style  makes  one  only  feel  the  more  how  easily,  if  He 
chose,  he  could  avoid  the  necessity  of  having  recourse  to  such 
outrages." 

His  own  generation  felt  his  license  to  be  extreme.  "  In  affect- 
ing the  ancients,"  said  Ben  Jonson,  "  he  writ  no  language." 
Daniel  writes  sarcastically,  soon  after  the  Faerie  Queene  appeared, 
of  those  who 

**  Sing  of  knights  and  Palladincs, 
In  aged  accents  and  untimely  words." 


SPENSER. 


91 


And  to  us,  though  students  of  the  language  must  always  find 
interest  in  the  storehouse  of  ancient  or  invented  language  to  be 
found  in  Spenser,  this  mixture  of  what  is  obsolete  or  capriciously 
new  is  a  bar,  and  not  an  unreasonable  one,  to  a  frank  welcome  at 
first  acquaintance.  Fuller  remarks,  with  some  slyness,  that  "  the 
many  Chaucerisms  used  ( for  I  will  not  say,  affected)  by  him  are 
thought  by  the  ignorant  to  be  blemishes,  known  by  the  learned  to  be 
beauties,  in  his  book;  which  notwithstanding  had  been  more  sale- 
able, if  more  conformed  to  our  modern  language."  The  grotesque, 
though  it  has  its  place  as  one  of  the  instruments  of  poetical  effect, 
is  a  dangerous  element  to  handle.  Spenser's  age  was  very  insensi- 
ble to  the  presence  and  the  dangers  of  the  grotesque,  and  he  was 
not  before  his  time  in  feeling  what  was  unpleasing  in  incongruous 
mixtures.  Strong  in  the  abundant  but  unsifted  learning  of  his  day, 
a  style  of  learning  which  in  his  case  was  strangely  inaccurate,  he 
not  only  mixed  the  past  with  the  present,  fairyland  v/ith  politics, 
mythology  with  the  most  serious  Christian  ideas,  but  he  often 
mixed  together  the  very  features  which  are  most  discordant,  in  the 
colours,  forms,  and  methods  by  which  he  sought  to  produce  the 
effect  of  his  pictures. 

3.  Another  source  of  annoyance  and  disappointment  is  found  in 
the  imperfections  and  inconsistencies  of  the  poet's  standard  of  what 
is  becoming  to  say  and  to  write  about.  Exaggeration,  diffuseness, 
prolixity,  were  the  literary  diseases  of  the  age ;  an  age  of  great 
excitement  and  hope,  which  had  suddenly  discovered  its  wealth  and 
its  powers,  but  not  the  rules  of  true  economy  in  using  them.  With 
the  classics  open  before  it,  and  alive  to  much  of  the  grandeur  of 
their  teaching,  it  was  almost  blind  to  the  spirit  of  self-restraint, 
proportion,  and  simplicity  which  governed  the  great  models.  It 
was  left  to  a  later  age  to  discern  these  and  appreciate  them. 
This  unresisted  proneness  to  exaggeration  produced  the  extrava- 
gance and  the  horrors  of  the  Elizabethan  Drama,  full,  as  it  was, 
nevertheless,  of  insight  and  originality.  It  only  too  naturally 
led  the  earlier  Spenser  astray.  What  Dryden,  in  one  of  his  inter- 
esting critical  prefaces  says  of  himself,  is  true  of  Spenser : 
Thoughts,  such  as  they  are,  come  crowding  in  so  fast  upon  me, 
that  my  only  difficulty  is  to  choose  or  to  reject ;  to  run  them  into  verse, 
or  to  give  them  the  other  harmony  of  prose."  There  was  in  Spen- 
ser a  facility  for  turning  to  account  all  material,  original  or  borrow- 
ed, an  incontinence  of  the  descriptive  faculty,  which  was  ever  ready 
to  exercise  itself  on  any  object,  the  most  unfitting  and  loathsome,  as 
on  the  noblest,  the  purest,  or  the  most  beautiful.  There  are 
pictures  in  him  which  seem  meant  to  turn  our  stomach.  Worse 
than  that,  there  are  pictures  which  for  a  time  rank  the  poet  of 
Holiness  or  Temperance  with  the  painters  who  used  their  great  art  to 
represent  at  once  the  most  sacred  and  holiest  forms,  and  also 
scenes  which  few  people  now  like  to  look  upon  in  company — scenes 
and  descriptions  which  may,  perhaps  from  the  habits  of  the  time, 
have  been  playfully  and  innocently  produced,  but  which  it  is  cer- 
tainly not  easy  to  dwell  upon  innocently  now.    And  apart  from  these 


92 


SPENSER. 


serious  faults,  there  is  continually  haunting  us,  amid  incontestable 
richness,  vigour,  and  beauty,  a  sense  that  the  work  is  overdone. 
Spenser  certainly  did  not  want  for  humour  and  an  eye  for  the  ri-" 
diculous.  There  is  no  want  in  him,  either,  of  that  power  of 
epigrammatic  terseness,  which,  in  spite  of  its  diffuseness,  his  age 
valued  and  cultivated.  But  when  he  gets  on  a  story  or  a  scene, 
he  never  knows  where  to  stop.  His  duels  go  on  stanza  after  stanza 
till  there  is  no  sound  part  left  in  either  champion.  His  palaces,  land- 
scapes, pageants,  feasts,  are  taken  to  pieces  in  all  their  parts,  and  all 
these  parts  are  likened  to  some  other  things.  His  abundance,"  says 
Mr.  Craik,  is  often  oppressive  ;  //  is  like  wading  among  unmown 
grass.''''  And  he  drowns  us  in  words.  His  abundant  and  incon- 
gruous adjectives  may  sometimes,  perhaps,  startle  us  unfairly,  be- 
cause their  associations  and  suggestions  have  quite  altered  ;  but 
very  often  they  are  the  idle  outpouring  of  an  unrestrained  affluence 
of  language.  The  impression  remains  that  he  wants  a  due  percep- 
tion of  the  absurd,  the  unnatural,  the  unnecessary  ;  that  he  does 
not  care  if  he  makes  us  smile,  or  does  not  know  how  to  help  it, 
when  he  tries  to  make  us  admire  or  sympathise. 

Under  this  head  comes  a  feature  which  the  "  charity  of  history  " 
may  lead  us  to  treat  as  simple  exaggeration,  but  which  often  sug- 
gests something  less  pardonable,  in  the  great  characters,  political 
or  Hterary,  of  Elizabeth's  reign.  This  was  the  gross,  shameless, 
lying  flattery  paid  to  the  Queen.  There  is  really  nothing  like  it  in 
history.  It  is  unique  as  a  phenomenon  that  proud,  able,  free-spo- 
ken men,  with  all  their  high  instincts  of  what  was  noble  and  true, 
with  all  their  admiration  of  the  Queen's  high  qualities,  should  have 
offered  it,  even  as  an  unmeaning  custom  ;  and  that  a  proud  and 
free-spoken  people  should  not,  in  the  very  genuineness  of  their 
pride  in  her  and  their  loyalty,  have  received  it  with  shouts  of 
derision  and  disgust.  The  flattery  of  Roman  emperors  and  Roman 
Popes,  if  as  extravagant,  was  not  so  personal.  Even  Louis  XIV. 
was  not  celebrated  in  his  dreary  old  age  as  a  model  of  ideal  beauty 
and  a  paragon  of  romantic  perfection.  It  was  no  worship  of  a 
secluded  and  distant  object  of  loyalty :  the  men  who  thus  flattered 
knew  perfectly  well  often  by  painful  experience,  what  Elizabeth 
was  :  able,  indeed,  high-spirited,  successful,  but  ungrateful  to  her 
servants,  capricious,  vain,  ill-tempered,  unjust,  and  in  her  old  age 
ugly.  And  yet  the  Gloriana  of  the  Faerie  Queene^  the  Empress  of 
all  nobleness — Belphcebe,  the  Princess  of  all  sweetness  and  beauty 
— Britomart,  the  armed  votaress  of  all  purity — Mercilla,  the  lady  of 
all  compassion  and  grace — were  but  the  reflection  of  the  language 
in  which  it  was  then  agreed  upon  by  some  of  the  greatest  of 
Englishmen  to  speak,  and  to  be  supposed  to  think,  of  the  Queen. 

II.  But  when  all  these  faults  have  been  admitted,  faults  of  de- 
sign and  faults  of  execution — and  when  it  is  admitted,  further,  that 
there  is  a  general  want  of  reality,  substance,  distinctness,  and 
strength  in  the  personages  of  the  poem — that,  compared  with  the 
contemporary  drama,  Spenser's  knights  and  ladies  and  villains  are 
thin  and  ghost-like,  and  that  as  Daniel  says,  he 
"  Paints  shadows  in  imaginary  lines — 


SPENSER. 


93 


it  yet  remains  that  our  greatest  poets  since  his  day  have  loved  him 
and  delighted  in  him.  He  had  Shakespere's  praise.  Cowley  was 
made  a  poet  by  reading  him.  Dryden  calls  Milton  "the  poetical 
son  of  Spenser:  "  "Milton,"  he  writes,  "has  acknowledged  to  me 
that  Spenser  was  his  original."  Dryden's  own  homage  to  him  is 
frequent  and  generous.  Pope  found  as  much  pleasure  in  the 
E'aerie  Queene  in  his  later  years  as  he  had  found  in  reading  it  when 
he  was  twelve  years  old  :  and  what  Milton,  Dryden,  and  Pope 
admired,  Wordsworth  too  found  full  of  nobleness,  purity,  and  sweet- 
ness. What  is  it  that  gives  the  Faerie  Queene  its  hold  upon  those 
who  appreciate  the  richness  and  music  of  English  language,  and 
who  in  temper  and  moral  standard  are  quick  to  respond  to  English 
manliness  and  tenderness  ?  The  spell  is  to  be  found  mainly  in 
three  things — (i)  in  the  quaint  stateliness  of  Spenser's  imaginary 
world  and  its  representatives ;  (2)  in  the  beauty  and  melody  of  his 
numbers,  the  abundance  and  grace  of  his  poetic  ornaments,  in  the 
recurring  and  haunting  rhythms  of  numberless  passages,  in  which 
thought  and  imagery  and  language  and  melody  are  interwoven  in 
one  perfect  and  satisfying  harmony ;  and  (3)  in  the  intrinsic  noble- 
ness of  his  general  aim,  his  conception  of  human  life,  at  once  so 
exacting  and  so  indulgent,  his  high  ethical  principles  and  ideals, 
his  unfeigned  honour  for  all  that  is  pure  and  brave  and  unselfish 
and  tender,  his  generous  estimate  of  what  is  due  from  man  to  man 
of  service,  affection,  and  fidelity.  His  fictions  embodied  truths  of 
character  which,  with  all  their  shadowy  incompleteness,  were  too 
real  and  too  beautiful  to  lose  their  charm  with  time. 

1.  Spenser  accepted  from  his  age  the  quaint  stateliness  which 
is  characteristic  of  his  poem.  His  poetry  is  not  simple  and  direct 
like  that  of  the  Greeks.  It  has  not  the  exquisite  finish  and  felicity 
of  the  best  of  the  Latins.  It  has  not  the  massive  grandeur,  the 
depth.;  the  freedom,  the  shades  and  subtle  complexities  of  feeling 
and  motive,  which  the  English  dramatists  found  by  going  straight 
to  nature.  It  has  the  stateliness  of  highly  artificial  conditions  of 
society,  of  the  Court,  the  pageant,  the  tournament,  as  opposed  to 
the  majority  of  the  great  events  in  human  life  and  history,  its 
vicissitudes,  its  catastrophes,  its  tradegies,  its  revolutions,  its  sins. 
Throughout  the  prolonged  crisis  of  Elizabeth's  reign,  her  gay  and 
dashing  courtiers,  and  even  her  serious  masters  of  affairs,  persisted 
in  pretending  to  look  on  the  world  in  which  they  lived  as  if  through 
the  side-scenes  of  a  masque,  and  relieved  against  the  background 
of  a  stage-curtain.  Human  life,  in  those  days,  counted  for  little  ; 
fortune,  honour,  national  existence  hung  in  the  balance ;  the  game 
was  one  in  which  the  heads  of  kings  and  queens  and  great  states- 
men were  the  stakes — yet  the  players  could  not  get  out  of  their 
stiff  and  constrained  costume,  out  of  their  artificial  and  fantastic  fig- 
ments of  thought,  out  of  their  conceits  and  affectations  of  language. 
They  carried  it,  with  all  their  sagacity,  with  all  their  intensity  of 
purpose,  to  the  council-board  and  the  judgment-seat.  They  car- 
ried it  to  the  scaffold.  The  conventional  supposition  was  that  at 
the  Court,  though  every  one  knew  better,  all  was  perpetual  holiday, 


94 


SPENSER. 


perpetual  triumpli,  perpetual  love-making.  It  was  the  happy  reign 
of  the  good  and  wise  and  lovely.  It  was  the  discomfiture  of  the 
base,  the  faithless,  the  wicked,  the  traitors.  This  is  what  is  re- 
flected in  Spenser's  poem  ;  at  once,  its  stateliness,  for  there  was  no 
want  of  grandeur  and  magnificence  in.  the  public  scene  ever  before 
Spenser's  imagination ;  and  its  quaintness,  because  the  whole  out- 
ward apparatus  of  representation  was  borrowed  from  what  was 
past,  or  from  what  did  not  exist,  and  implied  surrounding  circum- 
stances in  ludicrous  contrast  with  fact,  and  men  taught  themselves 
to  speak  in  character,  and  prided  themselves  on  keeping  it  up  by 
substituting  for  the  ordinary  language  of  life  and  emotion  a  cum- 
brous and  involved  indirectness  of  speech. 

And  yet  that  quaint  stateliness  is  not  without  its  attractions. 
We  have  indeed  to  fit  ourselves  for  it.  But  when  we  have  submit- 
ted to  its  demands  on  our  imagination,  it  carries  us  along  as  much 
as  the  fictions  of  the  stage.  The  splendours  of  the  artificial  are 
not  the  splendours  of  the  natural ;  yet  the  artificial  has  its  splen- 
dours, which  impress  and  captivate  and  repay.  The  grandeur  of 
Spenser's  poem  is  a  grandeur  like  that  of  a  great  spectacle,  a  great 
array  of  the  forces  of  a  nation,  a  great  series  of  military  effects,  a 
great  ceremonial  assemblage  of  all  that  is  highest  and  most  em- 
inent in  a  country,  a  coronation,  a  royal  marriage,  a  triumph,  a 
funeral.  So,  though  Spenser's  knights  and  ladies  do  what  no  men 
ever  could  do,  and  speak  what  no  man  ever  spoke,  the  procession 
rolls  forward  with  a  pomp  which  never  forgets  itself,  and  with  an 
inexhaustible  succession  of  circumstance,  fantasy,  and  incident. 
Nor  is  it  always  solemn  and  high-pitched.  Its  gravity  is  relieved 
from  time  to  time  with  the  ridiculous  figure  of  character,  the  ludi- 
crous incident,  the  jests  and  antics  of  the  buffoon.  It  has  been 
said  that  Spenser  never  smiles.  He  not  only  smiles,  with  amuse- 
ment or  sly  irony ;  he  wrote  what  he  must  have  laughed  at  as  he 
wrote,  and  meant  us  to  laugh  at.  He  did  not  describe  with  a  grave 
face  the  terrors  and  misadventures  of  the  boaster  Braggadochio 
and  his  Squire,  whether  or  not  a  caricature  of  the  Duke  of  Alengon 
and  his  gentleman,"  the  "petit  singe,"  Simier.  He  did  not  write 
with  a  grave  face  the  Irish  row  about  the  false  Florimel  (IV.5); 

**  Then  unto  Satyran  she  was  adjudged, 
Who  was  right  glad  to  gaine  so  goodly  meed : 
But  Blandamour  thereat  full  greatly  grudged, 
And  litie  prays'd  his  labours  evill  speed, 
That  for  to  winne  the  saddle  lost  the  steed. 
Ne  lesse  thereat  did  Paridell  complaine, 
And  thought  t*  appeale  from  that  which  was  decreed 
To  single  combat  with  Sir  Satyrane: 
Thereto  him  Ate  stird,  new  discord  to  maintaine. 

**  And  eke,  with  these,  full  many  other  Knights 
She  through  her  wicked  working  did  incense 
Her  to  demaund  and  chalenge  as  their  rights, 
Deserved  for  their  perilsre'  compense. 


SPENSER. 


95 


Amongst  the  rest,  with  boastfull  vaine  pretense, 
Stept  Braggadochio  forth,  and  as  his  thrall 
Her  claym'd,  by  him  in  battell  wonne  long  sense : 
Whereto  her  selfe  he  did  to  witnesse  call  : 
Who,  being  askt,  accordingly  confessed  all. 

"  Thereat  exceeding  wroth  was  Satyran; 
And  wroth  with  Satyran  was  Blandamour ; 
And  wroth  with  Blandamour  was  Erivan; 
And  at  them  both  Sir  Paridell  did  loure. 

Nor  the  behaviour  of  the  rascal  many  ^'  at  the  sight  of  the 
dead  Dragon  (I.  12)  : 

"  And  after  all  the  raskall  many  ran» 
Heaped  together  in  rude  rablement, 
To  see  the  face  of  that  victorious  man, 
Whom  all  admired  as  from  heaven  sent, 
And  gazd  upon  with  gaping  wonderment ; 
But  when  they  came  where  that  dead  Dragon  lay, 
Strctcht  on  the  ground  in  monstrous  large  extent, 
The  sight  with  ydle  feare  did  fihem  dismay, 
Ne  durst  approch  him  nigh  to  touch,  or  once  assay. 

"  Some  feard,  and  fledd  ;  some  feard,  and  well  it  fayneds 
One,  that  would  wiser  seeme  then  all  the  rest, 
Warnd  him  not  touch,  for  yet  perhaps  remaynd 
Some  lingring  life  within  his  hollow  brest. 
Or  in  his  wombe  might  lurke  some  hidden  nest 
Of  many  Dragonettes,  his  fruitful  seede  : 
Another  saide,  that  in  his  eyes  did  rest 
Yet  sparckling  fyre,  and  badd  thereof,  take  heed  5 
Another  said,  he  saw  him  move  his  eyes  indeed. 

"  One  mother,  whenas  her  foolehardy  chyld 
Did  come  too  neare,  and  with  his  talants  play, 
Halfe  dead  through  feare,  her  litle  babe  revyld, 
And  to  her  gossibs  gan  in  counsell  say  ; 
*  How  can  I  tell,  but  that  his  talants  may 
Yet  scratch  my  sonne,  or  rend  his  tender  hand  ? ' 
So  diversly  them  selves  in  vaine  they  fray  ; 
Whiles  some  more  bold  to  measure  him  nigh  stand, 
To  prove  how  many  acres  he  did  spred  of  land." 

And  his  humour  is  not  the  less  real  that  it  affects  serious  argib 
ment,  in  the  excuse  which  he  urges  for  his  fairy  tales  (II.  l)  : 

"  Right  well  I  wote,  most  mighty  Soveraine, 
That  all  this  famous  antique  history 
Of  some  th'  aboundance  of  an  ydle  braine 
W^ill  judged  be,  and  painted  forgery, 
Rather  then  matter  of  just  memory ; 
Sith  none  that  breathe  th  living  aire  dees  know 
Where  is  that  happy  land  of  Faery, 
Which  I  so  much  doe  vaunt,  yet  no  where  show, 
But  vouch  antiquities,  whieh  no  body  can  knew. 


96 


SPENSER. 


"  But  let  that  man  with  better  sence  advize, 
That  of  the  world  least  part  to  us  is  red  ; 
And  daily  how  through  hardy  enterprize 
Many  great  Regions  are  discovered, 
Which  to  late  age  were  never  mentioned. 
Who  ever  heard  of  th'  Indian  Peru  ? 
Or  who  in  venturous  vessell  measured 
The  Amazon  huge  river,  now  found  trew  ? 
Or  fruitfullest  Virginia  who  did  ever  vew  ? 

Yet  all  these  were,  when  no  man  did  them  know. 
Yet  have  from  wisest  ages  hidden  beene ; 
And  later  times  thinges  more  unknowne  shall  show. 
Why  then  should  witlesse  man  so  much  misweene, 
That  nothing  is  but  that  which  he  hath  seene  ? 
What  if  within  the  Moones  fayre  shining  spheare, 
What  if  in  every  other  starre  unseene 
Of  other  worldes  he  happily  should  heare, 
He  wonder  would  much  more  ;  yet  such  to  some  appeare." 

The  general  effect  is  almost  always  lively  and  rich  :  all  is  buoy- 
ant and  full  of  movement.  That  it  is  also  odd,  that  we  see  strange 
costumes  and  hear  a  language  often  formal  and  obsolete,  that  we 
are  asked  to  take  for  granted  some  very  unaccustomed  supposition 
and  extravagant  assumption,  does  not  trouble  us  more  than  the 
usao^es  and  sights,  so  strange  to  ordinary  civil  life,  of  a  camp,  or  a 
royal  levee.  All  is  in  keeping,  whatever  may  be  the  details  of  the 
pageant ;  they  harmonise  with  the  effect  of  the  whole,  like  the  gar^ 
goyles  and  quaint  groups  in  a  Gothic  building  harmonise  with  its 
general  tone  of  majesty  and  subtle  beauty  : — nay,  as  ornaments,  in 
themselves  of  bad  taste,  like  much  of  the  ornamentation  of  the 
Renaissance  styles,  yet  find  a  not  unpleasing  place  in  compositions 
grandly  and  nobly  designed  : 

"  So  discord  oft  in  music  makes  the  sweeter  lay." 

Indeed,  it  is  curious  how  much  of  real  variety  is  got  out  of  a 
limited  number  of  elements  and  situations.  The  spectacle,  though 
consisting  only  of  knights,  ladies,  dwarfs,  pagans,  "salvage  men," 
enchanters,  and  monsters,  and  other  well-worn  machinery  of  the 
books  of  chivalry,  is  ever  new,  full  of  vigour  and  fresh  images,  even 
if,  as  sometimes  happens,  it  repeats  itself.  There  is  a  majestic  un- 
consciousness of  all  violations  of  probability,  and  of  the  strangeness 
of  the  combinations  which  it  unrolls  before  us. 

2.  But  there  is  not  only  stateliness  :  there  is  sweetness  and 
beauty.  Spenser's  perception  of  beauty  of  all  kinds  was  singularly 
and  characteristically  quick  and  sympathetic.  It  was  one  of  his 
great  gifts  ;  perhaps  the  most  special  and  unstinted.  Except  Shake- 
spere,  who  had  it  with  other  and  greater  gifts,  no  one  in  that  time 
approached  to  Spenser,  in  feeling  the  presence  of  that  commanding 
and  mysterious  idea,  compounded  of  so  many  things,  yet  of  which 
t!ic  true  secret  escapes  us  still,  to  which  we  give  the  name  of  beauty. 


SPENSER. 


97 


A  beautiful  scene,  a  beautiful  person,  a  beautiful  poem,  a  mind  and 
character  with  that  combination  of  cliarms,  which,  for  want  of  an- 
other word,  we  call  by  that  half-spiritual,  half-material  word  "  beauti- 
ful," at  once  set  his  imagination  at  work  to  respond  to  it  and  re- 
flect it.  His  means  of  reflecting  it  were  as  abundant  as  his  sense 
of  it  was  keen.  They  were  only  too  abundant.  They  often  betrayed 
him  by  their  affluence  and  wonderful  readiness  to  meet  his  call. 
Say  what  we  will,  and  a  great  deal  may  be  said,  of  his  lavish  pro- 
fusion, his  heady  and  uncontrolled  excess,  in  the  richness  of  picture 
and  imagery  in  which  he  indulges — still,  there  it  lies  before  us,  like 
the  most  gorgeous  of  summer  gardens,  in  the  glory  and  brilliancy 
of  its  varied  blooms,  in  the  wonder  of  its  strange  forms  of  life,  in 
the  changefulness  of  its  exquisite  and  delicious  scents.  No  one 
who  cares  for  poetic  beauty  can  be  insensible  to  it.  He  may  criticise 
it.  He  may  have  too  much  of  it.  He  may  prefer  something  more 
severe  and  chastened.  He  may  observe  on  the  waste  of  wealth  and 
power.  He  may  blame  the  prodigal  expense  of  language  and  the  long 
spaces  which^the  poet  takes  up  to  produce  his  effect.  He  may  often 
dislike  or  distrust  the  moral  aspect  of  the  poet's  impartial  sensitive- 
ness to  all  outward  beauty — the  impartiality  which  makes  him  throw 
all  his  strength  into  his  pictures  of  Acrasia'sBower  of  Bliss,  the  Gar- 
den of  Adonis,  and  Busirane's  Masque  of  Cupid.  But  there  is  no 
gainsaying  the  beauty  which  never  fails  and  disappoints,  open  the 
poem  where  you  will.  There  is  no  gainsaying  its  variety,  often  so 
unexpected  and  novel.  Face  to  face  with  the  Epicurean  idea  of 
beauty  and  pleasure  is  the  counter-charm  of  purity,  truth,  and  duty. 
Many  poets  have  done  justice  to  each  one  separately.  Few  have 
shown,  with  such  equal  power,  why  it  is  that  both  have  their  roots 
in  man's  divided  nature,  and  struggle,  as  it  were,  for  the  mastery. 
Which  can  be  said  to  be  the  most  exquisite  in  all  beauty  of  imagi- 
nation, of  refined  language,  of  faultless  and  matchless  melody,  of 
these  two  passages,  in  which  the  same  image  is  used  for  the  most 
opposite  purposes  ;— first,  in  that  song  of  temptation,  the  sweetest 
note  in  that  description  of  Acrasia's  Bower  of  Bliss,  which,  as  a 
picture  of  the  spells  of  pleasure,  has  never  been  surpassed  :  and 
next,  to  represent  that  stainless  and  glorious  purity  which  is  the 
professed  object  of  his  admiration  and  homage.  In  toth  the  beauty 
of  the  rose  furnishes  the  theme  of  the  poet's  treatment.  In  the 
first,  it  is  the  "lovely  lay  "  which  meets  the  knight  of  Temperance 
amid  the  voluptuousness  which  he  is  come  to  assail  and  punish : 

"  The  whiles  some  one  did  chaunt  this  lovely  lay; 
Ah!  see,  whoso  fayre  thing doestfaine  to  see, 
In  springing  flowre  the  image  of  thy  day. 
Ah  !  see  the  Virgin  Rose,  how  sweetly  shee 
Doth  first  peepe  foorth  with  bashfull  modestee, 
That  fairer  seemes  the  lesseye  see  her  may. 
Lo  !  see  soone  after  how  more  bold  and  free 
Her  bared  bosom.e  she  doth  broad  display; 
Lo  !  see  soone  after  how  she  fades  and  falls  away. 

7 


98 


SPENSER. 


"  So  passeth,  in  the  passing  of  a  day, 
Of  niortall  life  the  leafe,  the  bud,  the  flowre  ; 
Ne  more  doth  florish  after  first  decay, 
That  earst  was  sought  to  deck  both  bed  and  bowre 
Of  many  a  lady,  and  many  a  Paramovvre. 
Gather  therefo're  the  Rose  whilest  yet  is  prime, 
For  soone  comes  age  that  will  her  pride  deflowre; 
Gather  the  Rose  of  love  whilst  yet  is  time, 
Whilest  loving  thou  niayst  loved  be  with  equall  crime." 

In  the  other,  it  images  the  power  of  the  will— that  power  over 
circumstance  and  the  storms  of  passion,  to  command  obedience  to 
reason  and  the  moral  law,  which  Milton  sung  so  magnificently  in 
Comus  : 

That  daintie  Rose,  the  daughter  of  her  Morne, 
More  deare  then  life  she  tendered,  whose  flowre 
The  girlond  of  her  honour  did  adorne : 
Ne  suffred  she  the  Middayes  scorching  powre, 
Ne  the  sharp  Northerne  wind  thereon  to  showre; 
But  lapped  up  her  silken  leaves  most  chayre, 
When  so  the  froward  skye  began  tolowre  ; 
But,  soone  as  calmed  was  the  christall  ayre. 
She  die  it  fayre  dispred  and  let  to  florish  fayre. 

"  Eternall  God,  in  his  almightie  powre, 
To  make  ensample  of  his  heavenly  grace, 
In  Paradize  whylome  did  plant  this  flowre; 
Whence  he  it  fetcht  out  of  her  native  place, 
And  did  in  stocke  of  earthly  flesh  enrace, 
That  mortall  men  her  glory  should  admyre. 
In  gentle  Ladies  breste,  and  bounteous  race 
Of  woman  kind,  it  fayrest  Flowre  doth  spyre, 
And  beareth  fruit  of  honour  and  all  chast  desyre. 

"  Fa3Te  ympes  of  beautie,  whose  bright  shining  beames 
Adorne  the  worlde  with  like  to  heavenly  light. 
And  to  your  willes  both  royalties  and  Reames 
Subdew,  through  conquest  of  your  wondrous  might, 
V/ith  this  fayre  flowre  your  goodly  girlonds  dight 
Of  chastity  and  vertue  virginall, 
That  shall  embellish  more  your  beautie  bright, 
And  crowne  your  heades  with  heavenly  coronall, 
Such  as  the  Angels  weare  before  God's  tribunall  I  " 

This  sense  of  beauty  and  command  of  beautiful  expression  is 
not  seen  only  in  the  sweetness  of  which  both  these  passages  are 
examples.  Its  range  is  wide.  Spenser  had  in  his  nature,  besides 
sweetness,  his  full  proportion  of  the  stern  and  high  manliness  of 
his  generation  ;  indeed,  he  v/as  not  without  its  severity,  its  hard- 
ness, its  unconsidering  and  cruel  harshness,  its  contemptuous  in« 
difference  to  sufferinp^  and  misery  when  on  the  wrong  side.  Noble 
and  heroic  ideals  cajjtivate  him  by  their  attractions.  He  kindles 
naturally  and  genuinely  at  what  proves  and  draws  out  men's  courage, 


SPENSER, 


99 


their  self-command,  their  self-sacrifice.  He  sympathizes  as  pro- 
foundlv  with  the  strangeness  of  their  condition,  with  the  sad  sur- 
prises in  their  history  and  fate,  as  he  gives  himself  up  with  little  re- 
straint to  what  is  charming  and  even  intoxicating  in  it.  He  can 
moralise  with  the  best  in  terse  and  deep-reaching  apophthegms  of 
melancholy  or  even  despairing  experience.  He  can  appreciate  tlie 
mysterious  depths  and  awful  outlines  of  theology — of  what  our  own 
age  can  see  nothing  in,  but  a  dry  and  scholastic  dogmatism.  His 
great  contemporaries  were — more,  perhaps,  than  the  men  of  any  age 
— many-sided.  He  shared  their  nature ;  and  he  used  all  that  he 
had  of  sensitiveness  and  of  imaginative  and  creative  power,  in 
bringing  out  its  manifold  aspects,  and  sometimes  contradictory 
feelings  and  aims.  Not  that  beauty,  even  varied  beauty,  is  the  un- 
interrupted attribute  of  his  work.  It  alternates  with  much  that  no 
indulgence  can  call  beautiful.  It  passes  but  too  easily  into  what  is 
commonplace,  or  forced,  or  unnatural,  or  extravagant,  or  careless 
and  poor,  or  really  coarse  and  bad.  He  was  a  negligent  corrector. 
He  only  at  times  gave  himself  the  trouble  to  condense  and  concen- 
trate. But  for  all  this,  the  Faerie  Qtiee7te  glows  and  is  ablaze  with 
beauty ;  and  that  beauty  is  so  rich,  so  real,  and  so  uncommon,  that 
for  its  sake  the  severest  readers  of  Spenser  have  pardoned  much 
that  is  discordant  with  it — much  that  in  the  reading  has  wasted 
their  time  and  disappointed  them. 

There  is  one  portion  of  the  beauty  of  the  Faerie  Qiieene  which 
in  its  perfection  and  fulness  had  never  yet  been  reached  in  English 
poetry.  This  was  the  music  and  melody  of  his  verse.  It  was  this 
wonderful,  almost  unfaihng  sweetness  of  numbers  which  probably 
as  much  as  anything  set  the  Faerie  Queene  at  once  above  all  con- 
temporary poetry.  The  English  language  is  really  a  musical 
one,  and,  say  what  people  will,  the  English  ear  is  very  susceptible 
to  the  infinite  delicacy  and  suggestiveness  of  musical  rhythm  and 
cadence.  Spenser  found  the  secret  of  it.  The  art  has  had  many 
and  consummate  masters  since,  as  different  in  their  melody  as  in 
their  thoughts  from  Spenser.  And  others  at  the  time,  Shakespere 
pre-eminently,  heard,  only  a  little  later,  the  same  grandeur  and  the 
same  subtle  beauty  in  the  sounds  of  their  mother-tongue,  only 
waiting  the  artist's  skill  to  be  combined  and  harmonised  into  strains 
of  mysterious  fascination.  But  Spenser  was  the  first  to  show  that 
he  had  acquired  a  command  over  what  had  hitherto  been  heard 
only  in  exquisite  fragments,  passing  too  soon  into  roughness  and 
confusion.  It  would  be  too  much  to  say  that  his  cunning  never 
fails,  that  his  ear  is  never  dull  or  off  its  guard.  But  when  the 
length  and  magnitude  of  the  composition  are  considered,  with  the 
restraints  imposed  by  the  new  nine-line  stanza,  however  convenient 
it  may  have  been,  the  vigour,  the  invention,  the  volume  and  rush 
of  language,  and  the  keenness  and  truth  of  ear  amid  its  diversified 
tasks,  are  indeed  admirable  which  could  keep  up  so  prolonged  and  so 
majestic  a  stream  of  original  and  varied  poetical  melody.  If  his 
stanzas  are  monotonous,  it  is  with  the  grand  monotony  of  the  sea- 
shore, where  billow  follows  billow,  each  swelling  diversely,  and 


lOO 


SPENSER. 


broken  into  different  curves  and  waves  upon  its  mounting  surface, 
till  at  last  it  falls  over,  and  spreads  and  rushes  up  in  a  last  long 
line  of  foam  upon  the  beach. 

3.  But  all  this  is  but  the  outside  shell  and  the  fancy  framework 
in  which  the  substance  of  the  poem  is  enclosed.  Its  substance  is 
the  poet's  philosophy  of  life.  It  shadows  forth,  in  type  and  parable, 
his  ideal  of  the  perfection  of  the  human  character,  with  its  special 
features,  its  trials,  its  achievements.  There  were  two  accepted  forms 
in  poetry  in  which  this  had  been  done  by  poets.  One  was  under  the 
image  of  warfare  ;  the  other  was  under  the  image  of  a  journey  or 
voyage.  Spenser  chose  the  former,  as  Dante  and  Bunyan  chose  the 
latter.  Spenser  looks  on  the  scene  of  the  world  as  a  continual 
battle-field.  It  was  such  in  fact,  to  his  experience  in  Ireland,  testing 
the  mettle  of  character,  its  loyalty,  its  sincerity,  its  endurance.  His 
picture  of  character  is  by  no  means  painted  with  sentimental  tender- 
ness. He  portrays  it  in  the  rough  work  of  the  struggle  and  the  toil, 
always  hardly  tested  by  trial,  often  overmatched,  deceived,  defeated, 
and  even  delivered  by  its  own  default  to  disgrace  and  captivity.  He 
had  full  before  his  eyes  what  abounded  in  the  society  of  his  day, 
often  in  its  noblest  representatives — the  strange  perplexing  mixture 
of  the  purer  with  the  baser  elements,  in  the  high-tempered  and  aspir- 
ing activity  of  his  time.  But  it  was  an  ideal  of  character  which  had 
in  it  high  aims  and  serious  purposes,  which  was  armed  with  fortitude 
and  strength,  which  could  recover  itself  after  failure  and  defeat. 

The  unity  of  a  story,  or  an  allegory — that  chain  and  backbone  of 
continuous  interest,  implying  a  progress  and  leading  up  to  a  climax, 
which  holds  together  the  great  poems  of  the  world,  \ht  Iliad  and 
Odyssey,  the  j^neid^  the  Cojujnedia,  the  Paradise  Lost,  the  J  ems  a- 
lem  Delivered — this  is  wanting  in  the  Faerie  Queene.  The  unity 
is  one  of  character  and  its  ideal.  That  character  of  the  completed 
man,  raised  above  what  is  poor  and  low,  and  governed  by  noble  tem- 
pers and  pure  principles,  has  in  Spenser  two  conspicuous  elements. 
In  the  first  place,  it  is  based  on  manliness.  In  the  personages 
which  illustrate  the  different  virtues — Holiness,  Justice,  Courtesy, 
and  the  rest — the  distinction  is  not  in  nicely  discriminated  features 
or  shades  of  expression,  but  in  the  trials  and  the  occasions  which 
call  forth  a  practical  action  or  effort  :  yet  the  manliness  which  is  at 
the  foundation  of  all  that  is  good  in  them  is  a  universal  quality 
common  to  them  all,  rooted  and  embedded  in  the  governing  idea  or 
standard  of  moral  character  in  the  poem.  It  is  not  merely  courage, 
it  is  not  merely  energy,  it  is  not  merely  strength.  It  is  the  quality, 
of  soul  which  frankly  accepts  the  conditions  in  human  hfe,  of  labour 
of  obedience,  of  effort,  of  unequal  success,  which  does  not  quarrel 
with  them  or  evade  them,  but  takes  for  granted  with  unquestioning 
alacrity  that  man  is  called — by  his  call  to  high  aims  and  destiny — 
to  a  continual  struggle  with  difficulty,  with  pain,  with  evil,  and 
makes  it  the  point  of  honour  not  to  be  dismayed  or  weaned  out  by 
them.  It  is  a  cheerful  and  serious  willingness  for  hard  work  and 
endurance,  as  being  inevitable  and  very  l)parable  necessities,  to- 
gether with  even  a  pleasure  in  encountering  trials  which  put  a  man 


SPENSEJ^- 


lOI 


on  his  mettle,  an  enjoyment  of  the  contest  and  the  risk,  even  in 
play.  It  is  the  quality  which  seizes  on  the  paramount  idea  of  duty, 
as  something  which  leaves  a  man  no  choice  ;  which  despises  and 
breaks  through  the  inferior  considerations  and  motives — trouble, 
uncertainty,  doubt,  curiosity — which  hang  about  and  impede  duty; 
which  is  impatient  with  the  idleness  and  childishness  of  a  life  of 
mere  amusement,  or  mere  looking  on,  of  continued  and  self-satisfied 
levity,  of  vacillation,  of  clever  and  ingenious  trifling.  Spenser's 
manliness  is  quite  consistent  with  long  pauses  of  rest,  with  inter- 
vals of  change,  with  great  craving  for  enjoyment — nay,  with  great 
lapses  from  its  ideal,  with  great  mixtures  of  selfishness,  with  coarse- 
ness, with  licentiousness,  with  injustice  and  inhumanity.  It  may 
be  fatally  diverted  into  bad  channels ;  it  may  degenerate  into  a 
curse  and  scourge  to  the  world.  But  it  stands  essentially  distinct 
from  the  nature  which  shrinks  from  difficulty,  which  is  appalled  at 
effort,  which  has  no  thought  of  making  an  impression  on  things 
around  it,  which  is  content  with  passively  receiving  influences  and 
distinguishing  between  emotions,  which  feels  no  call  to  exert  itself, 
because  it  recognises  no  aim  valuable  enough  to  rouse  it,  and  no 
obligation  strong  enough  to  command  it.  In  the  character  of  his 
countrymen  round  him,  in  its  highest  and  in  its  worst  features,  in  its 
noble  ambition,  its  daring  enterprise,  its  self-devotion,  as  well  as  in 
its  pride,  its  intolerance,  its  fierce  self-will,  its  arrogant  claims  of 
superiority — moral,  political,  religious — Spenser  saw  the  example 
of  that  strong  and  resolute  manliness  which,  once  set  on  great 
things,  feared  nothing — neither  toil  nor  disaster  nor  danger — in 
their  pursuit.  Naturally  and  unconsciously,  he  laid  it  at  the  bottom 
of  all  his  portraitures  of  noble  and  virtuous  achievements  in  the 
Faerie  Queene. 

All  Spenser's  "  virtues "  spring  from  a  root  of  manliness 
Strength,  simplicity  of  aim,  elevation  of  spirit,  courage  are  presup 
posed  as  their  necessary  conditions.  But  they  have  with  him 
another  condition  as  universal.  They  all  grow  and  are  nourished 
from  the  soil  of  love ;  the  love  of  beauty,  the  love  and  service  of  fair 
women.  This,  of  course,  is  a  survival  from  the  ages  of  chivalry, 
an  inheritance  bequeathed  from  the  minstrels  of  France,  Italy,  and 
Germany  to  the  rising  poetry  of  Europe.  Spenser's  types  of  man- 
hood are  imperfect  without  the  idea  of  an  absorbing  and  over- 
mastering passion  of  love  ;  without  a  devotion,  as  to  the  principal 
and  most  worthy  object  of  life,  to  the  service  of  a  beautiful  lady, 
and  to  winning  her  affection  and  grace.  The  influence  of  this 
view  of  life  comes  out  in  numberless  ways.  Love  comes  on  the 
scene  in  shapes  which  are  exquisitely  beautiful,  in  all  its  purity,  its 
tenderness,  its  unselfishness.  But  the  claims  of  its  all-ruiing  and 
irresistible  might  are  also  only  too  readily  verified  in  the  passions 
of  men  ;  in  the  follies  of  love,  its  entanglements,  its  mischiefs,  its 
foulness.  In  one  shape  or  another  it  meets  us  at  every  turn;  it  is 
never  absent ;  it  is  the  motive  and  stimulant  of  the  whole  activity 
of  the  poem.  The  picture  of  life  held  up  before  us  is  the  literal 
rendering  of  Coleridge's  lines  : 


102 


SPENSER. 


*^  All  thoughts,  all  passions,  all  delights, 
Whatever  stirs  this  mortal  frame, 
Are  all  but  ministers  of  Love, 

And  feed  his  sacred  flame." 

We  still  think  with  Spenser  about  the  paramount  place  of  manliness, 
as  the  foundation  of  all  worth  in  human  character.  We  have  ceased 
to  think  with  him  about  the  rightful  supremacy  of  love,  even  in  the 
imaginative  conception  of  human  life.  We  have  ceased  to  recog- 
nise in  it  the  public  claims  of  almost  a  religion,  which  it  has  in 
Spenser.  Love  will  ever  play  a  great  part  in  human  life  to  the  end 
of  time.  It  will  be  an  immense  element  in  its  happiness,  perhaps  a 
still  greater  one  in  its  sorrows,  its  disasters,  its  tragedies.  It  is 
still  an  immense  power  in  shaping  and  colouring  it,  both  in  fiction 
and  reality;  in  the  family,  in  the  romance,  in  the  fatalities  and  the 
prosaic  ruin  of  vulgar  fact.  But  the  place  given  to  it  by  Spenser 
is  to  our  thoughts  and  feelings  even  ludicrously  extravagant.  An 
enormous  change  has  taken  place  in  the  ideas  of  society  on  this 
point :  it  is  one  of  the  things  which  make  a  wide  chasm  between 
centuries  and  generations  which  yet  are  of  ''the  same  passions," 
and  have  in  temper,  tradition,  and  language  so  much  in  common. 
The  ages  of  the  Courts  of  Love,  whom  Chaucer  reflected,  and  whose 
ideas  passed  on  through  him  to  Spenser,  are  to  us  simply  strange 
and  abnormal  states  through  which  society  has  passed,  to  us  beyond 
understanding  and  almost  belief.  The  perpetual  love-making,  as 
one  of  the  first  duties  and  necessities  of  a  noble  life,  the  space  which 
it  must  fill  in  the  cares  and  thoughts  of  all  gentle  and  high-reaching 
spirits,  the  unrestrained  language  of  admiration  and  worship,  the 
unrestrained  yielding  to  the  impulses,  the  anxieties,  the  pitiable 
despair  and  agonies  of  love,  the  subordination  to  it  of  all  other  pur- 
suits and  aims,  the  weeping  and  wailing  and  self-torturing  which  it 
involves,  all  this  is  so  far  apart  from  what  we  know  of  actual  life, 
the  life  not  merely  of  work  and  business,  but  the  life  of  affection, 
and  even  of  passion,  that  it  makes  the  picture  of  which  it  is  so 
necessary  a  part  seem  to  us  in  the  last  degree  unreal,  unimagi- 
nable, grotesquely  ridiculous.  The  quaint  love  sometimes  found 
among  children,  so  quickly  kindled,  so  superficial,  so  violent  in  its 
language  and  absurd  in  its  plans,  is  transferred  with  the  utmost 
gravity  to  the  serious  proceedings  of  the  wise  and  good.  In  the 
highest  characters  it  is  chastened,  refined,  purified:  it  appropriates, 
indeed,  language  due  only  to  the  divine,  it  almost  simulates  idol- 
atry, yet  it  belongs  to  the  best  part  of  man's  nature.  But  in  the 
lower  and  average  characters  it  is  not  so  respectable;  it  is  apt  to 
pass  into  mere  toying  pastime  and  frivolous  love  of  pleasure ;  its  a 
tonishes  us  often'by'the  readiness  with  which  it  displays  an  affinity 
for  the  sensual  and  impure,  the  corrupting  and  debasing  sides  of 
the  relations  between  the  sexes.  But  however  it  appears,  it  is 
throughout  a  very  great  affair,  not  merely  with  certain  persons,  or 
under  certain  circumstances,  but  with  every  one  :  it  obtrudes  itself 
in  public,  as  the  natural  and  recognised  motive  of  plans  of  life  and 
trials  of  strength  ;  it  is  the  great  spur  of  enterprise,  and  its  highest 


SPENSER. 


and  most  glorious  reward.  A  world  of  which  this  is  the  law  is  not 
even  in  fiction  a  world  which  we  can  conceive  possible,  or  with 
which  experience  enables  us  to  sympathise. 

It  is,  of  course,  a  purely  artificial  and  conventional  reading  of 
the  facts  of  human  life  and  feeling.  Such  conventional  readings 
and  renderings  belong  in  a  measure  to  all  art ;  but  in  its  highest 
forms  they  are  corrected,  interpreted,  supplemented  by  the 
presence  of  interspersed  realities  which  every  one  recognises. 
But  it  was  one  of  Spenser's  disadvantages,  that  two  strong  in- 
fluences combined  to  entangle  him  in  this  fantastic  and  grotesque 
way  of  exhibiting  the  play  and  action  of  the  emotions  of  love. 
This  all-absorbing,  all-embracing  passion  of  love,  at  least  this  way 
of  talking  about  it,  was  the  fashion  of  the  Court.  Further,  it  was 
the  fashion  of  poetry,  which  he  inherited  ;  and  he  was  not  the 
man  to  break  through  the  strong  bands  of  custom  and  authority. 
In  very  much  he  was  an  imitator.  He  took  what  he  found  ;  what 
was  his  own  was  his  treatment  of  it.  He  did  not  trouble  himself 
with  inconsistencies,  or  see  absurdities  and  incongruities.  Habit 
and  familiar  language  made  it  not  strange  that  in  the  Court  of 
Elizabeth  the  most  high-flown  sentiments  should  be  in  every  one's 
mouth  about  the  sublimities  and  refinements  of  love,  while  every 
one  was  busy  with  keen  ambition  and  unscrupulous  intrigue. 
The  same  blinding  power  kept  him  from  seeing  the  monstrous 
contrast  between  the  claims  of  the  queen  to  be  the  ideal  of 
womanly  purity — claims  recognised  and  echoed  in  ten  thousand 
extravagant  compliments — and  the  real  licentiousness  common  all 
round  her  among  her  favourites.  All  these  strange  contradictions, 
which  surprise  and  shock  us,  Spenser  assumed  as  natural.  He 
built  up  his  fictions  on  them,  as  the  dramatist  built  on  a  basis 
which,  though  more  nearly  approaching  to  real  life,  yet  differed 
widely  from  it  in  many  of  its  preliminary  and  collateral  supposi- 
tions ;  or  as  the  novelist  builds  up  his  on  a  still  closer  adherence 
to  facts  and  experience.  In  this  matter  Spenser  appears  with  a 
kind  of  double  self.  At  one  time  he  speaks  as  one  penetrated 
and  inspired  by  the  highest  and  purest  ideas  of  love,  and  filled 
with  aversion  and  scorn  for  the  coarser  forms  of  passion — for 
what  is  ensnaring  and  treacherous,  as  well  as  for  what  is  odious 
and  foul.  At  another,  he  puts  forth  all  his  power  to  bring  out  its 
most  dangerous  and  even  debasing  aspects  in  highly  coloured 
pictures,  which  none  could  paint  without  keen  sympathy  with  what 
he  takes  such  pains  to  make  vivid  and  fascinating.  The  com- 
bination is  not  like  anything  modern,  for  both  the  elements  are  in 
Spenser  so  unquestionably  and  simply  genuine.  Our  modern  poets 
are,  with  all  their  variations  in  this  respect,  more  homogeneous  ; 
and  where  one  conception  of  love  and  beauty  has  taken  hold  of  a 
man,  the  other  does  not  easily  come  in.  It  is  impossible  to  imagine 
Wordsworth  dwelling  with  zest  on  visions  and  imagery,  on  whicli 
Spenser  has  lavished  all  his  riches.  There  can  be  no  doubt  of 
Byron's  real  habits  of  thought  and  feeling  on  subjects  of  this  kind, 
even  when  his  language  for  the  occasion  is  the  chastest ;  we  detect 


104 


SPENSER. 


in  it  the  mood  of  the  moment,  perhaps  spontaneous,  perhaps  put 
on,  but  in  contradiction  to  the  whole  movement  of  the  man's  true  na- 
ture. But  Spenser's  words  do  not  ring  hollow.  With  a  kind  of  uncon-" 
sciousness  and  innocence,  which  we  now  find  hard  to  understand, 
and  which,  perhaps,  belongs  to  the  early  childhood  or  boyhood  of  a 
literature,  he  passes  abruptly  from  one  standard  of  thought  and 
feeling  to  another  ;  and  is  quite  as  much  in  earnest  when  he  is 
singing  the  pure  joys  of  chastened  affections,  as  he  is  when  he  is 
writing  with  almost  riotous  luxuriance  what  we  are  at  this  day 
a-shamed  to  read.  Tardily,  indeed,  he  appears  to  have  acknowl- 
edged the  contradiction.  At  the  instance  of  two  noble  ladies  oi 
the  Court,  he  composed  two  Hymns  of  Heavenly  Love  and 
Heavenly  Beauty,  to  ^'  retract "  and  reform  "  two  earlier  ones 
composed  in  praise  of  earthly  love  and  beauty.  But,  character- 
istically, he  published  the  two  pieces  together,  side  by  side  in  the 
same  volume. 

In  the  Faerie  Qiieene^  Spenser  has  brought  out,  not  the  image 
of  the  great  Gloriana,  but  in  its  various  aspects  a  form  of  character 
which  was  then  just  coming  on  the  stage  of  the  world,  and  which 
has  played  a  great  part  in  it  since.  As  he  has  told  us,  he  aimed  at 
presenting  before  us,  in  the  largest  sense  of  the  word,  the  English 
gentleman.  It  was,  as  a  whole,  a  new  character  in  the  world.  It 
had  not  really  existed  in  the  days  of  feudahsm  and  chivalry,  though 
features  of  it  had  appeared,  and  its  descent  was  traced  from  those 
times :  but  they  were  too  wild  and  coarse,  too  turbulent  and 
disorderly,  for  a  character  which,  however  ready  for  adventure  and 
battle,  looked  to  peace,  refinement,  order,  and  law  as  the  true  con- 
ditions of  its  perfection.  In  the  days  of  EHzabeth  it  was  begin- 
ning to  fill  a  large  place  in  Enghsh  life.  It  was  formed  amid  the 
increasing  cultivation  of  the  nation,  the  increasing  varieties  of 
public  service,  the  awakening  responsibilities  to  duty  and  calls  to 
self-command.  Still  making  much  of  the  prerogative  of  noble 
blood  and  family  honours,  it  was  something  independent  of 
nobility  and  beyond  it.  A  nobleman  might  have  in  him  the 
making  of  a  gentleman  :  but  it  was  the  man  himself  of  whom  the 
gentleman  was  made.  Great  birth,  even  great  capacity,  were 
not  enough  *,  there  must  be  added  a  new  delicacy  of  conscience,  a 
new  appreciation  of  what  is  beautiful  and  worthy  of  honour,  a 
new  measure  of  the  strength  and  nobleness  of  self-control,  of 
devotion  to  unselfish  interests.  This  idea  of  manhood,  based 
not  only  on  force  and  courage,  but  on  truth,  on  refinement,  on 
public  spirit,  on  soberness  and  modesty,  on  consideration  for 
others,  was  taking  possession  of  the  younger  generation  of 
Elizabeth's  middle  years.  Of  course  the  idea  was  very  imperfectly 
apprehended,  still  more  imperfectly  realised.  Butitwas  something 
which  on  the  same  scale  had  not  been  yet,  and  which  was  to  be 
tlie  seed  of  something  greater.  It  was  to  grow  into  those  strong, 
simple,  noble  characters,  pure  in  aim  and  devoted  to  duty,  the 
Falklands  the  Hampdens,  who  amid  so  much  evil  form  such  a 
remarkable  feature  in  the  Civil  Wars  both  on  the  Royalist  and 


SPENSER. 


the  Parliamentary  sides.  It  was  to  grow  into  that  high  type  (>f 
cultivated  English  nature,  in  the  present  and  the  last  century, 
common  both  to  its  monarchical  and  its  democratic  embodiments, 
than  which,  with  all  its  faults  and  defects,  our  western  civilization 
has  produced  few  things  more  admirable. 

There  were  three  distinguished  men  of  that  time,  who  one 
after  another  were  Spenser's  friends  and  patrons,  and  who  were 
men  in  whom  he  saw  realised  his  conceptions  of  human  excellence 
and  nobleness.  They  were  Sir  Philip  Sidney,  Lord  Grey  ol 
Wilton,  and  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  :  and  the  Faerie  Queene  reflects, 
as  in  a  variety  of  separate  mirrors  and  spirituahsed  forms,  the 
characteristics  of  these  men  and  of  such  as  they.  It  reflects  their 
conflicts,  their  temptations,  their  weaknesses,  the  evils  they  fought 
with,  the  superiority  with  which  they  towered  over  meaner  and 
poorer  natures.  Sir  Philip  Sidney  may  be  said  to  have  been  the 
first  typical  example  in  English  society  of  the  true  gentleman. 
The  charm  which  attracted  men  to  him  in  life,  the  fame  which  he 
left  behind  him,  are  not  to  be  accounted  for  simply  by  his  accom- 
plishments as  a  courtier,  a  poet,  a  lover  of  literature,  a  gallant 
soldier ;  above  all  this,  there  was  something  not  found  in  the 
strong  or  brilliant  men  about  him,  a  union  and  harmony  of  all  high 
qualities  differing  from  any  of  them  separately,  which  gave  a  fire 
of  its  own  to  his  literary  enthusiasm,  and  a  sweetness  of  its  own  to  his 
courtesy.  Spenser's  admiration  for  that  bright  but  short  career 
was  strong  and  lasting.  Sidney  was  to  him  a  verification  of  what 
he  aspired  to  and  imagined ;  a  pledge  that  he  was  not  dreaming 
in  portraying  Prince  Arthur's  greatness  of  soul,  the  religious 
chivalry  of  the  Red  Cross  Knight  of  Holiness,  the  manly  purity 
and  self-control  of  Sir  Guyon.  It  is  too  much  to  say  that  in  Prince 
Arthur,  the  hero  of  the  poem,  he  always  intended  Sidney.  In  the 
first  place,  it  is  clear  that  under  that  character  Spenser  in  places 
pays  compliments  to  Leicester,  in  whose  service  he  began  fife, 
and  whose  claims  on  his  homage  he  ever  recognised.  Prince 
Arthur  is  certainly  Leicester,  in  the  historical  passages  in  the 
Fifth  Book  relating  to  the  war  in  the  Low  Countries  in  1576 :  and 
no  one  can  be  meant  but  Leicester  in  the  bold  allusion  in  the 
First  Book  (ix.  17)  to  Elizabeth's  supposed  thoughts  of  marrying 
him.  In  the  next  place,  allegor}^,  like  caricature,  is  not  bound  to 
make  the  same  person  and  the  same  image  always  or  perfectly 
coincide;  and  Spenser  makes  full  use  of  this  liberty.  But  when 
he  was  painting  the  picture  of  the  Kingly  Warrior,  in  whom  was 
to  be  summed  up  in  a  magnificent  unity  the  diversified  graces  of 
other  men,  and  who  was  to  be  ever  ready  to  help  and  support  his 
fellows  in  their  hour  of  need,  and  in  their  conflict  with  evil,  he 
certainly  had  before  his  mind  the  well-remembered  lineaments  of 
Sidney's  high  and  generous  nature.  And  he  further  dedicated  a 
separate  book,  the  last  that  he  completed,  to  the  celebration  of 
Sidney's  special  "virtue  "  of  Courtesy.  The  martial  strain  of  the 
poem  changes  once  more  to  the  pastoral  of  the  Shepherd's  Cale?tdar 
to  describe  Sidney's  wooing  of  Frances  Walsingham,  the  fail 


io6 


SPENSER. 


Pastorella ;  his  conquests,  by  his  sweetness  and  grace,  over  the 
churlishness  of  rivals  ;  and  his  triumphant  war  against  the  monster 
spirit  of  ignorant  and  loud-tongued  insolence,  the  "  Blatant  Beast 
of  religious,  political,  and  social  slander. 

Again,  in  Lord  Grey  of  Wilton,  gentle  by  nature,  but  so  stern 
in  the'hour  of  trial,  called  reluctantly  to  cope  not  only  with  anarchy, 
but  with  intrigue  and  disloyalty,  finding  selfishness  and  thank- 
lessness  everywhere,  but  facing  all  and  doing  his  best  with  a  heavy 
beart,  ending  his  days  prematurely  under  detraction  and  disgrace, 
Spenser  had  before  him  a  less  complete  character  than  Sidney, 
but  yet  one  of  grand  and  severe  manliness,  in  which  were  con^ 
spicuous  a  religious  hatred  of  disorder,  and  an  unflinching  sense 
of  public  duty.  Spenser's  admiration  of  him  was  sincere  and 
earnest.  In  his  case  the  allegory  almost  becomes  history.  Arthur, 
Lord  Grey,  is  Sir  Arthegal,  the  Knight  of  Justice.  The  story 
touches,  apparently,  on  some  passages  of  his  career,  when  his 
dislike  of  the  French  marriage  placed  him  in  opposition  to  the 
Queen,  and  even  for  a  time  threw  him  with  the  supporters  of  Mary. 
But  the  adventures  of  Arthegal  mainly  preserve  the  memory 
of  Lord  Grey's  terrible  exploits  against  wrong  and  rebellion  in 
Ireland.  These  exploits  are  represented  in  the  doings  of  the  iron 
man  Talus,  his  squire,  with  his  destroying  flail,  swift,  irresistible, 
inexorable ;  a  figure,  borrowed  and  altered,  after  Spenser's  wont, 
from  a  Greek  legend.  His  overthrow  of  insolent  giants,  his  an- 
nihilation  of  swarming  "rascal  routs,"  idealise  and  glorify  that 
unrelenting  policy,  of  which,  though  condemned  in  England,  Spen- 
ser continued  to  be  the  advocate.  In  the  story  of  Arthegal,  long 
separated  by  undeserved  misfortunes  from  the  favour  of  the 
armed  lady,  Britomart,  the  virgin  champion  of  right,  of  whom  he 
was  so  worthy,  doomed  in  spite  of  his  honours  to  an  early  death, 
and  assailed  on  his  return  from  his  victorious  service  by  the  furious 
insults  of  envy  and  malice,  Spenser  portrays,  almost  without  a 
veil,  the  hard  fate  of  the  unpopular  patron  whom  he  to  the  last 
defended  and  honoured. 

Raleigh,  his  last  protector,  the  Shepherd  of  the  Ocean,  to 
whose  judgment  he  referred  the  work  of  his  life,  and  under  whose 
guidance  he  once  more  tried  the  quicksands  of  the  Court,  belonged 
to  a  different  class  from  Sidney  or  Lord  Grey ;  but  of  his  own 
clas»  he  was  the  consummate  and  matchless  example.  He  had 
not  Sidney's  fine  enthusiasm  and  nobleness  ;  he  had  not  either 
Sidney's  affectations.  He  had  not  Lord  Grey's  single-minded 
hatred  of  wrong.  He  was  a  man  to  whom  his  own  interests  were 
much  ;  he  was  unscrupulous  ;  he  was  ostentatious  ;  he  was  not 
above  stooping  to  mean,  unmanly  compliances  with  the  humours 
of  the  Queen.  But  he  was  a  man  with  a  higher  ideal  than  he  at- 
tempted to  follow.  He  saw,  not  without  cynical  scorn,  through 
the  shows  and  hollowness  of  the  world.  His  intellect  was  of  that 
clear  and  unembarrassed  power  which  takes  in  as  wholes  things 
which  other  men  take  in  part  by  part.  And  he  was  in  its  highest 
form  a  representative  of  that  spirit  of  adventure  into  the  unknown 


SPENSER. 


107 


and  the  wonderful  of  which  Drake  was  the  coarser  and  rougher 
example,  realising  in  serious  earnest,  on  the  sea  and  in  the  New 
World,  the  li-fe  of  knight-errantry  feigned  in  romances.  With  Raleigh 
as  with  Lord  (n'ey,  Spenser  comes  to  history  ;  and  he  even  seems  to 
have  been  moved,  as  the  poem  went  on,  partly  by  pity,  partly  by 
amusement,  to  shadow  forth  in  his  imaginary  world,  not  merely 
Raleigh's  brilliant  qualities,  but  also  his  frequent  misadventures  and 
mischances  in  his  career  at  Court.  Of  all  her  favourites^  Raleigh 
was  the  one  whom  his  wayward  mistress  seemed  to  find  most  delight 
in  tormenting.  The  offence  which  he  gave  by  his  secret  marriage 
suggested  the  scenes  describing  the  utter  desolation  of  Prince 
Arthur's  squire,  Timias,  at  the  jealous  wrath  of  the  Virgin  Hun- 
tress, Belphoebe — scenes  which,  extravagant  as  they  are,  can  hardly 
be  called  a  caricature  of  Raleigh's  real  behaviour  in  the  Tower  in 
1593.  But  Spenser  is  not  satisfied  with  this  one  picture.  In  the 
last  Book  Timias  appears  again,  the  victim  of  slander  and  ill-usage, 
even  after  he  had  recovered  Belphoebe's  favour;  he  is  baited  like 
a  wild  bull  by  mighty  powers  of  malice,  falsehood,  and  calumny; 
he  is  wounded  by  the  tooth  of  the  Blatant  Beast;  and  after  having 
been  cured,  net  without  difficulty,  and  not  without  significant 
indications  on  the  part  of  the  poet  that  hi^s  friend  had  need  to 
restrain  and  chasten  his  unruly  spirit,  he  is  again  delivered  over 
to  an  ignominious  captivity,  and  the  insults  of  Disdain  and  Scorn. 

"  Then  up  he  made  him  rise,  and  forward  fare, 
Led  in  a  rope  which  both  his  hands  did  bynd  ; 
Ne  ought  that  foole  for  pity  did  him  spare, 
But  with  his  whip,  him  following  behynd, 
Him  often  scourg'd,  and  forst  his  feete  to  fynd  : 
And  other-whiles  with  bitter  mockes  and  mowes 
He  would  him  scorne,  that  to  his  gentle  mynd 
Was  much  more  grievous  then  the  others  blowes  : 
Words  sharpely  v/ound,  but  greatest  griefe  of  scorning  growes." 

Spenser  knew  Raleigh  only  in  the  promise  of  his  adventurous 
prime — so  buoyant  and  fearless,  so  inexhaustible  in  project  and 
resource,  so  unconquerable  by  checks  and  reverses.  The  gloomier 
portion  of  Raleigh's  career  v/as  yet  to  come  :  its  intrigues,  its  grand 
yet  really  gambling  and  unscrupulous  enterprises,  the  long  years  of 
prison  and  authorship,  and  its  not  unfitting  close,  in  the  English 
statesman's  death  by  the  headsman — so  tranquil  though  violent,  so 
ceremoniously  solemn,  so  composed,  so  dignified — such  a  contrast 
to  all  other  forms  of  capital  punishment,  then  or  since. 

Spenser  has  been  compared  to  Pindar,  and  contrasted  with 
Cervantes.  The  contrast,  in  point  of  humour,  and  the  truth  that 
humour  implies,  is  favourable  to  the  Spaniard  :  in  point  of  moral 
earnestness  and  sense  of  poetic  beauty,  to  the  Englishman.  What 
Cervantes  only  thought  ridiculous,  Spenser  used,  and  not  in  vain, 
for  a  high  purpose.  The  ideas  of  knight-errantry  v/ere  really  more 
absurd  than  Spenser  allowed  himself  to  see.  But  that  idea  of  the 
gentleman  which  they  suggested,  that  picture  of  human  life  as  3 


io8 


scene  of  clanger,  trial,  effort,  defeat,  recovery,  which  they  lent 
themselves  to  image  forth,  vva»  more  worth  insisting  on,  than  the 
exposure  of  their  folly  and  extravagance.  There  was  nothing  to 
be  made  of  them.  Cervantes  thought ;  and  nothing  to  be  done,  but 
to  laugh  off  what  they  had  left,  among  living  Spaniards,  of  pom- 
pous imbecility  or  mistaken  pretensions.  Spenser,  knowing  that 
they  must  die,  yet  believed  that  out  of  them  might  be  raised  some- 
thing nobler  and  more  real— enterprise,  duty,  resistance  to  evil, 
refinement,  hatred  of  the  mean  and  base.  The  energetic  and  high- 
reaching  manhood  which  he  saw  in  the  remarkable  personages 
round  him  he  shadowed  forth  in  the  Faerie  Qtieeite,  He  idealised 
the  excellences  and  the  trials  of  this  first  generation  of  English 
gentlemen,  as  Bunyan  afterwards  ideahsed  the  piety,  the  confticts, 
and  the  hopes  of  Puritan  religion.  Neither  were  universal  types  ; 
neither  were  perfect.  The  manhood  in  which  Spenser  delights, 
with  all  that  was  admirable  and  attractive  in  it,  had  still  much  of 
boyish  incompleteness  and  roughness :  it  had  noble  aims,  it  had 
generosity,  it  had  loyalty,  it  had  a  very  real  reverence  for  purity 
and  religion  ;  but  it  was  young  in  experience  of  anew  world,  it  was 
wanting  in  self-mastery,  it  was  often  pedantic  and  self-conceited  ; 
it  was  an  easier  prey  than  it  ought  to  have  been  to  discreditable 
temptations.  And  there  is  a  long  interval  between  any  of  Spenser's 
superficial  and  thin  conceptions  of  character,  and  such  deep  and 
subtle  creations  as  Hamlet  or  Othello,  just  as  Bunyan's  strong  but 
narrow  ideals  of  religion,  true  as  they  are  up  to  a  certain  point, 
fall  short  of  the  length  and  breadth  and  depth  of  what  Christianity 
has  made  of  man,  and  may  yet  make  of  him.  But  in  the  ways 
which  Spenser  chose,  he  will  always  delight  and  teach  us.  The 
spectacle  of  what  is  heroic  and  self-devoted,  of  honour  for  principle 
and  truth,  set  before  us  with  so  much  insight  and  sympathy,  and 
combined  v/ith  so  much  just  and  broad  observation  on  those  acci- 
dents and  conditions  of  our  mortal  state  which  touch  us  all,  will 
never  appeal  to  English  readers  in  vain,  till  we  have  learned  a  new 
language,  and  adopted  new  canons  of  art,  of  taste,  and  of  morals. 
It  is  not  merely  that  he  has  left  imperishable  images  which  have 
taken  their  place  among  the  consecrated  memorials  of  poetry  and 
the  household  thoughts  of  all  cultivated  men.  But  he  has  perma- 
nently lifted  the  level  of  English  poetry  by  a  great  and  sustained 
effort  of  rich  and  varied  art,  in  which  one  main  purpose  rules, 
loyalty  to  what  is  noble  and  pure,  and  in  which  this  main  purpose 
subordinates  to  itself  every  feature  and  every  detail,  and  harmonises 
some  that  by  themselves  seem  least  in  keeping  with  it. 


lOQ 


CHAPTER  VI. 

SECOND  PART  OF  THE  FAERIE  QUEENE. — SPENSER'S  LAST 

YEARS. 

[1590— 1599.] 

The  publication  of  the  Faerie  Queene  in  1590  had  made  the 
new  poet  of  the  Shepherd's  Calendar  a  famous  man.  He  was  no 
longer  merely  the  favourite  of  a  knot  of  enthusiastic  friends,  and 
outside  of  them  only  recognised  and  valued  at  his  true  measure  by 
such  judges  as  Sidney  and  Raleigh.  By  the  common  voice  of  all 
the  poets  of  his  time  he  was  now  acknowledged  as  the  first  of  living 
English  poets.  It  is  not  easy  for  us,  who  hve  in  these  late  times 
and  are  famihar  with  so  many  literary  master-pieces,  to  realise  the 
surprise  of  a  first  and  novel  achievement  in  literature  ;  the  effect 
on  an  age,  long  and  eagerly  seeking  after  poetical  expression,  of 
the  appearance  at  last  of  a  work  of  such  power,  richness,  and 
finished  art. 

It  can  scarcely  be  doubted,  I  think,  from  the  bitter  sarcasms 
interspersed  in  his  later  poems,  that  Spenser  expected  more  from 
his  triumph  dian  it  brought  him.  It  opened  no  way  of  advance- 
ment for  him  in  England.  He  continued  for  a  while  in  that  most 
ungrateful  and  unsatisfactory  employment,  the  service  of  the  State 
in  Ireland;  and  that  he  relinquished  in  1593.^  At  the  end  of 
1 591  he  was  again  at  Kilcolman.  He  had  written  and  probably 
sent  to  Raleigh,  though  he  did  not  publish  it  till  1595,  the  record 
already  quoted  of  the  last  two  years'  events,  Colin  Cloufs  come 
home  again — his  visit,  under  Raleigh's  guidance,  to  the  Court,  his 
thoughts  and  recollections  of  its  great  ladies,  his  generous  criticisms 
on  poets,  the  people  and  courtiers  whom  he  had  seen  and  heard  of  ; 
how  he  had  been  dazzled,  how  he  had  been  disenchanted,  and  how 
he  was  come  home  to  his  Irish  mountains  and  streams  and  lakes, 
to  enjoy  their  beauty,  though  in  a  salvage  "  and  "  foreign  "  land  ; 
to  find  in  this  peaceful  and  tranquil  retirement  something  far  better 
than  the  heat  of  ambition  and  the  intrigues  of  envious  rivalries ; 

*  Who  is  Edmondus  Spencer ^  Prebendary  of  Effin  (Elphin)?  in  a  list  of  arrears  of 
first-fruits  ;  Calendar  of  State  Papers,  Ireland^  Dec.  8,  1586,  p.  222.  Church  prefer- 
ments were  under  special  circumstances  allowed  to  be  held  by  laymen.  See  the  Queen's 
**  Instructions,'*  1579 ;  in  Preface  to  Calendar  of  Carew  MSS.  1589-1600,  p.  ci. 


no 


SPENSER, 


and  to  contrast  with  the  profanations  of  the  name  of  love  which  had 
disgusted  him  in  a  dissolute  society,  the  higher  and  purer  ideal  of 
it  which  he  could  honour  and  pursue  in  the  simplicity  of  his  country 
life. 

And  in  Ireland  the  rejected  adorer  of  the  Rosalind  of  the  Shep- 
herd's Ca/endar  found  another  and  still  more  perfect  Rosalind,  who, 
though  she  was  at  first  inclined  to  repeat  the  cruelty  of  the  earlier 
one,  in  time  relented,  and  received  such  a  dower  of  poetic  glory  as 
few  poets  have  bestowed  upon  their  brides.  It  has  always  ap- 
})eared  strange  that  Spenser's  passion  for  the  first  Rosalind  should 
have  been  so  lasting,  that  in  his  last  pastoral,  Colzn  Cloufs  come 
home  again,  written  so  late  as  1591,  and  put3lished  after  he  was 
married,  he  should  end  his  poem  by  reverting  to  this  long-past  love 
passage,  defending  her  on  the  ground  of  her  incomparable  excel- 
lence and  his  own  worthiness,  against  the  blame  of  friendly  "shep- 
herds," witnesses  of  the  languors  of  his  too  long  dying,"  and 
angry  with  her  hard-heartedness.  It  may  be  that,  according  to 
Sj)enser's  way  of  making  his  masks  and  figures  suggest  but  not  fully 
express  their  antitypes,*  Rosalind  here  bears  the  image  of  the  real 
mistress  of  this  time,  the  "  country  lass,"  the  Elizabeth  of  the  son- 
nets, who  was,  in  fact,  for  a  while  as  unkind  as  the  earlier  Rosalind. 
The  history  of  this  later  wooing,  its  hopes  and  anguish,  its  varying 
currents,  its  final  unexpected  success,  is  the  subject  of  a  collection 
of  Sonnets,  which  have  the  disadvantage  of  provoking  comparison 
with  the  Sonnets  of  Shakespere.  There  is  no  want  in  them  of 
grace  and  sweetness,  and  they  ring  true  with  genuine  feeling  and 
warm  aiiection,  though  they  have,  of  course,  their  share  of  the  con- 
ceits then  held  proper  for  love  poems.  But  they  want  the  power 
and  fire,  as  well  as  the  perplexing  mystery,  of  those  of  the  greater 
master.  His  bride  was  also  immortalized  as  a  fourth  among  the 
three  Graces,  in  a  richly-painted  passage  in  the  last  book  of  the 
Faetie  Queeite.  But  the  most  magnificent  tribute  to  her  is  the 
great  Wedding  Ode,  the  Epithala?mon^  the  finest  composition  of 
its  kind,  probably,  in  any  language  :  so  impetuous  and  unflagging, 
so  orderly  and  yet  so  rapid  in  the  onward  march  of  its  stately  and 
varied  stanzas;  so  passionate,  so  flashing  with  imaginative  wealth, 
yet  so  refined  and  self-restrained.  It  was  always  easy  for  Spenser 
to  open  the  floodgates  of  his  inexhaustible  fanc}^    With  him, 

The  numbers  flow  as  fast  as  spring  doth  rise." 

But  here  he  has  thrown  into  his  composition  all  his  power  of  con* 
centration,  of  arrangement,  of  strong  and  harmonious  government 
over  thought  and  image,  over  language  and  measure  and  rhythm; 
and  the  result  is  unquestionably  one  of  the  grandest  lyrics  in  English 
poetry.  We  have  learned  to  think  the  subject  unfit  for  such  free 
poetical  treatment;  Spenser's  age  did  not. 

Of  the  lady  of  whom  all  this  was  said,  and  for  whom  all  this  was 

*  "  In  these  kind  of  historical  allusions  Spenser  usually  perplexes  the  subject  •  he  leads 
you       ar  d  then  desir;]ied'y  misleads  you.  " — Upton,  quoted  by  Craik,  ili.  p.  92. 


SPENSER. 


Ill 


written,  the  family  name  has  not  been  thought  worth  preserving. 
We  know  that  by  her  Christian  name  she  was  a  namesake  of  the 
great  queen,  and  of  Spenser's  mother.  She  is  called  a  country  lass, 
which  may  mean  anything ;  and  the  marriage  appears  to  have  been 
solemnized  in  Cork  on  what  was  then  Midsummer  Day,  "  Barnaby 
the  Bright,'*  the  day  when  ^'the  sun  is  in  his  cheerful  height,"  June 
i  i»  1594-  Except  that  she  survived  Spenser,  that  she  married 
again,  and  had  some  legal  quarrels  with  one  of  her  own  sons  about 
his  lands,  we  know  nothing  more  about  her.  Of  two  of  the  chil- 
dren whom  she  brought  him,  the  names  have  been  preservedf 
and  they  indicate  that  in  spite  of  love  and  poetry,  and  the  charms 
of  Kilcolman,  Spenser  felt  as  Englishmen  feel  in  Australia  or  in 
India.  To  call  one  of  them  Sylvanus^  and  the  other  Peregrine^  re- 
veals to  us  that  Ireland  was  still  to  him  a  "  salvage  land,"  and  he  a 
pilgrim  and  stranger  in  it ;  as  Moses  called  his  first-born  Gershom, 
a  stranger  here — "  for  he  said,  I  have  been  a  stranger  in  a  strange 
land." 

In  a  year  after  his  marriage,  he  sent  over  these  memorials  of  it 
to  be  published  in  London,  and  they  v/ere  entered  at  Stationers' 
Hall  in  November,  1595.  The  same  year  he  came  over  himself, 
bringing  with  him  the  second  instalment  of  the  Faerie  Queetie^  which 
was  entered  for  publication  the  following  January,  1 595-6.  Thus 
the  half  of  the  projected  work  was  finished  ;  and  finished,  as  we 
know  from  one  of  the  Sonnets  (80),  before  his  marriage.  After  his 
long  *^race  through  Fairy  land,"  he  asks  leave  to  rest,  and  solace 
himself  with  his  love's  sweet  praise;"  and  then  as  a  steed  re- 
freshed after  toil,*'  he  will  "  stoutly  that  second  worke  assoyle." 
The  first  six  books  were  published  together  in  1596.  He  remained 
most  of  the  year  in  London,  during  which  The  Four  Hym^ts  07t 
Love  and  Beauty^  Earthly  and  Heavenly^  were  published  ;  and  also 
a  Dirge  {Daphnaida)  on  Douglas  Howard,  the  wife  of  Arthur 
Gorges,  the  spirited  narrator  of  the  Island  Voyage  of  Essex  and 
Raleigh,  written  in  1591 ;  and  a  ''spousal  verse  "  {Prothalamwn\ 
on  the  marriage  of  the  two  daughters  of  the  Earl  of  Worcester,  late 
in  1596.  But  he  was  only  a  visitor  in  London.  The  Prothalaniiori 
contains  a  final  record  of  his  disappointments  in  England. 

''  I,  (whom  sullein  care, 
Through  discontent  of  my  long  fruitlesse  stay 
In  Princes  Court,  and  expectation  vayne 
Of  idle  hopes,  which  still  doe  fly  away, 
Like  empty  shaddowes,  did  afflict  my  brayne,^ 
Walkt  forth  to  ease  my  payne 
Along  the  shoare  of  silver  streaming  Themmes — " 

His  marriage  ought  to  have  made  him  happy.  He  professed  to 
find  the  highest  enjoyment  in  the  quiet  and  retirement  of  country 
life.  He  was  in  the  prime  of  life,  successful  beyond  all  his  fellows 
in  his  special  work,  and  apparently  with  unabated  interest  in  what 
remained  to  be  done  of  it.  And  though  he  could  not  but  feel  him- 
self at  a  distance  from  the  "  sweet  civility  "  of  England,  and  soci- 


112 


SPENSER, 


ally  at  disadvantage  compared  to  those  whose  lines  had  fallen  to 
them  in  its  pleasant  places,  yet  nature,  which  he  loved  so  well,  was 
still  friendly  to  him,  if  men  were  wild  and  dangerous.  He  is  never 
weary  of  praising  the  natural  advantages  of  Ireland.  Speaking  of 
the  North,  he  says — 

**  And  sure  it  is  yet  a  most  beautifull  and  sweet  countrey  as  any  is  un- 
der heaven,  seamed  throughout  with  many  goodly  rivers,  replenished  with 
all  sortes  of  fish,  most  aboundantly  sprinckled  with  many  sweet  Ilandes, 
and  goodly  lakes,  like  litle  Inland  Seas,  that  will  carry  even  ships  upon 
theyr  waters,  adorned  with  goodly  woodes  fitt  for  building  of  howses  and 
shippes,  soe  comodiously,  as  that  yf  some  princes  in  the  world  had  them, 
they  would  soone  hope  to  be  lordes  of  all  the  seas,  and  ere  long  of  all  the 
world;  also  full  of  good  portes  and  havens  opening  upon  England  and 
Scotland,  as  inviting  us  to  come  to  them,  to  see  what  excellent  comodi- 
tyes  that  countrey  can  affoord,  besides  the  soyle  it  self  most  fertile,  fitt  to 
yeeld  all  kiud  of  fruite  that  shal  be  comitted  therunto.  And  lastly,  the 
heavens  most  niilde  and  temperat,  though  somewhat  more  moyst  then  the 
part  toward  the  West.'* 

His  own  home  at  Kilcolman  charmed  and  delighted  him.  It 
was  not  his  fault  that  its  trout  streams,  its  Mulla  and  Fanchin,  are 
not  as  famous  as  Walter  Scott's  Teviot  and  Tweed,  or  Words- 
worth's Yarrow  and  Duddon,  or  that  its  hills.  Old  Mole,  and  Arlo 
Hill,  have  not  kept  a  poetic  name  like  Helvellyn  and  '^Eildon's 
triple  height."  They  have  failed  to  become  famihar  names  to  us. 
But  the  beauties  of  his  home  inspired  more  than  one  sweet  pas- 
toral picture  in  the  Faerie  Queenej  and  in  the  last  fragment  re- 
maining to  us  of  it,  he  celebrates  his  mountains  and  woods  and 
valleys  as  once  the  fabled  resort  of  the  Divine  Huntress  and  her 
Nymphs,  and  the  meeting-place  of  the  Gods. 

There  was  one  drawback  to  the  enjoyment  of  his  Irish  country 
life,  and  of  the  natural  attractiveness  of  Kilcolman.  "  Who  knows 
not  Arlo  Hill  ?  "  he  exclaims,  in  the  scene  just  referred  to  from  the 
fragment  on  Mutability ,  "Arlo,  the  best  and  fairest  hill  in  all  the 
holy  island's  heights.'*  It  was  well  known  to  all  Englishmen  who 
had  to  do  with  the  South  of  Ireland.  How  well  it  was  known  in 
the  Irish  history  of  the  time,  may  be  seen  in  the  numerous  refer- 
ences to  it,  under  various  forms,  such  as  Aharlo,  Harlow,  in  the  In- 
dex to  the  Irish  Calendar  of  Papers  of  this  troublesome  date,  and 
to  continual  encounters  and  ambushes  in  its  notoriously  dangerous 
woods.  He  means  by  it  the  highest  part  of  the  Galtee  range,  be- 
low which  to  the  north,  through  a  glen  or  defile,  runs  the  river 
Aherlow."  Galtymore,  the  summit,  rises,  with  precipice  and  gully, 
more  than  3000  feet  above  the  plains  of  Tipperary,  and  is  seen  far 
and  wide.  It  was  connected  with  the  "great  wood,"  the  wild  re- 
gion of  forest,  mountain,  and  bog  which  stretched  half  across 
Munster  from  the  Suir  to  the  Shannon.  It  was  the  haunt  and  fast- 
ness of  Irish  outlawry  and  rebellion  in  the  South,  which  so  long 
sheltered  Desmond  and  his  followers.  Arlo  and  its  "  fair  forests," 
harbouring  "thieves  and  wolves,"  was  an  uncomfortable  neighbour 


SPENSER. 


to  Kilcolman.  The  poet  describes  it  as  ruined  by  a  curse  pro- 
nounced on  the  lovely  land  by  the  offended  goddess  of  the  Chase — 

"  Which  too  too  true  that  land's  in-dwellers  since  have  found." 

He  was  not  only  living  in  an  insecure  part,  on  the  very  border 
of  disaffection  and  disturbance,  but  like  every  Englishman  living 
in  Ireland,  he  was  living  amid  ruins.  An  English  home  in  Ireland, 
however  fair,  was  a  home  on  the  sides  of  ^tna  or  Vesuvius  :  it 
stood  where  the  lava  flood  had  once  passed,  and  upon  not  distant 
fires.  Spenser  has  left  us  his  thoughts  on  the  condition  of  Ire- 
land, in  a  paper  written  between  the  two  rebellions,  some  time  be- 
tween 1595  and  1598,  after  the  twelve  or  thirteen  years  of  so-called 
peace  which  followed  the  overthrow  of  Desmond,  and  when 
Tyrone's  rebellion  was  becoming  serious.  It  seems  to  have  been 
much  copied  in  manuscript,  but,  though  entered  for  publication  in 
1598,  it  was  not  printed  till  long  after  his  death,  in  1633.  A  copy 
of  it  among  the  Irish  papers  of  1 598  shows  that  it  had  come  under 
the  eyes  of  the  English  Government.  It  is  full  of  curious  obser- 
vations, of  shrewd  political  remarks,  of  odd  and  confused  ethnogra- 
phy; but  more  than  all  this,  it  is  a  very  vivid  and  impressive 
picture  of  what  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  called  "the  common  woe  of 
Ireland."  It  is  a  picture  of  a  noble  realm,  which  its  inhabitants 
and  its  masters  did  not  know  what  to  do  with  ;  a  picture  of  hope- 
less mistakes,  misunderstandings,  misrule  ;  a  picture  of  piteous 
misery  and  suffering  on  the  part  of  a  helpless  and  yet  untameable 
and  mischievous  population — of  unrelenting  and  scornful  rigour  on 
the  part  of  their  stronger  rulers,  which  yet  was  absolutely  ineffectual 
to  reclaim  or  subdue  them.  "  Men  of  great  wisdom,"  Spenser 
writes,  "  have  often  wished  that  all  that  land  were  a  sea-pool." 
Everything,  people  thought,  had  been  tried,  and  tried  in  vain. 

"  Marry,  soe  there  have  beene  divers  good  plottes  and  wise  counsells 
cast  alleready  about  reformation  of  that  realme  ;  but  they  say,  it  is  the 
fatall  desteny  of  that  land,  that  noe  purposes,  whatsoever  are  meant  for 
her  good,  will  prosper  or  take  good  effect,  which,  whether  it  proceede 
from  the  very  Genius  of  the  soyle,  or  influence  of  the  starres,  or  that 
Allmighty  God  hath  not  yet  appoynted  the  time  of  her  reformation,  or 
that  he  reserveth  her  in  this  unquiett  state  still  for  some  secrett  scourdge, 
which  shall  by  her  come  unto  England,  it  is  hard  to  be  knowen,  but  yet 
much  to  be  feared." 

The  unchanging  fatalities  of  Ireland  appear  in  Spenser's  account  in 
all  their  well-known  forms  ;  some  of  them,  as  if  they  were  what  we 
were  reading  of  yesterday.  Throughout  the  work  there  is  an 
/lonest  zeal  for  order,  an  honest  hatred  of  falsehood,  sloth,  treachery, 
and  disorder.  But  there  does  not  appear  a  trace  of  consideration 
for  what  the  Irish  might  feel  or  desire  or  resent.  He  is  sensible, 
indeed,  of  English  mismanagement  and  vacillation,  of  the  way  in 
which  money  and  force  were  wasted  by  riot  being  boldly  and  intel- 
ligently employed  ;  he  enlarges  on  that  power  of  malignity  and 

8 


114 


SPENSER, 


detraction  which  he  has  figured  in  the  Blatant  Beast  of  tlic  E\icrie 
Queene  :  but  of  Enghsh  cruelty,  of  English  injustice,  of  English 
ra^mcity,  of  Enghsh  prejudice,  he  is  profoundly  unconscious.  He 
on  y  sees  that  things  are  getting  worse  and  more  dangerous  ;  and 
tho  iorh  he,  hke  others,  has  his  "plot "for  the  subjugation  andpacifi- 
caticiJ  of  the  island,  and  shrinks  from  nothing  in  the  way  of  sever- 
ity, nrt  even,  if  necessary,  from  extermination,  his  outlook  is  one 
of  dee  despair.  He  calculates  the  amount  of  force,  of  money,  of 
time,  nt'  essary  to  break  down  all  resistance;  he  is  minute  and 
perhaps  skilful  in  building  his  forts  and  disposing  his  garrisons ; 
he  is  very  earnest  about  the  necessity  of  cutting  broad  roads 
through  the  woods,  and  building  bridges  in  place  of  fords;  he 
contemplates  restored  churches,  parish  schools,  a  better  order  of 
clergy.  But  where  the  spirit  was  to  come  from  of  justice,  of  con- 
ciliation, of  steady  and  firm  resistance  to  corruption  and  selfishness, 
he  gives  us  no  light.  What  it  comes  to  is,  that  v/ith  patience, 
temper,  and  public  spirit,  Ireland  might  be  easily  reformed  and 
brouoht  into  order :  but  unless  he  hoped  for  patience,  temper,  and 
public  spirit  from  Lord  Essex,  to  v/hom  he  seems  to  allude  as  the 
person  "  on  whom  the  eye  of  England  is  fixed,  and  our  last  hopes 
now  rest,"  he  too  easily  took  for  granted  what  was  the  real  difl[iculty. 
His  picture  is  exact  and  forcible,  of  one  side  of  the  truth;  it  seems 
beyond  the  thought  of  an  honest,  well-informed,  and  noble-minded 
Englishman  that  there  was  another  side. 

But  he  was  right  in  his  estimate  of  the  danger,  and  of  the  im- 
mediate evils  which  produced  it.  He  was  right  in  thinking  that 
want  of  method,  want  of  control,  want  of  confidence,  and  an  un- 
timely parsimony,  prevented  severity  from  having  a  fair  chance  of 
preparing  a  platform  for  reform  and  conciliation.  He  was  right  in 
his  conviction  of  the  inveterate  treachery  of  the  Irish  Chiefs,  partly 
the  result  of  ages  of  mismanagement,  but  now  incurable.  While 
he  was  writing,  Tyrone,  a  craftier  and  bolder  man  than  Desmond, 
was  taking  up  what  Desmond  had  failed  in.  He  was  playing  a 
game  with  the  English  authorities  which,  as  things  then  were,  is 
almost  beyond  belief.  He  was  outwitting  or  cajoling  the  veterans 
of  Irish  government,  who  knew  perfectly  well  what  he  was,  and  yet 
let  him  amuse  them  with  false  expectations — men  like  Sir  John 
Norreys.  who  broke  his  heart  when  he  found  out  how  Tyrone  had 
baffled  and  made  a  fool  of  him.  Wishing  to  gain  time  for  help 
from  Spain,  and  to  extend  the  rebellion,  he  revolted,  submitted, 
sued  for  pardon,  but  did  not  care  to  take  it  when  granted,  fearlessly 
presented  himself  before  the  English  officers  while  he  was  still 
beleaguering  their  posts,  led  the  English  forces  a  chase  through 
mountains  and  bogs,  inflicted  heavy  losses  on  them,  and  yet  man- 
aged to  keep  negotiations  open  as  long  as  it  suited  him.  From 
1594  to  1598  the  rebellion  had  been  gaining  ground;  it  had  crept 
round  from  Ulster  to  Connaught,  from  Connaught  to  Leinster,  and 
now  from  Connaught  to  the  borders  of  Munster.  But  Munster, 
with  its  English  landlords  and  settlers,  was  still,  on  the  whole, 
quiet.    At  the  end  of  1597,  the  Council  at  Dublin  reported  home 


SPENSER. 


that  Munster  was  the  best  tempered  of  all  the  rest  at  this  present 
time  ;  for  that  though  not  long  since  sundry  loose  persons  "  (among 
them  the  base  sons  of  Lord  Roche,  Spenser's  adversary  in  land 
suits)  "  became  Robin  Hoods  and  slew  some  of  the  undertakers, 
dwelling  scattered  in  thatched  houses  and  remote  places,  near  to 
woods  and  fastnesses,  yet  now  they  are  cut  off,  and  no  known  dis- 
turbers left  who  are  like  to  make  any  dangerous  alteration  on  the 
sudden."  But  they  go  on  to  add  that  they  have  intelligence  that 
many  are  practised  withal  from  the  North,  to  be  of  com]:)ination 
with  the  re"st,  and  stir  coals  in  Munster,  whereby  the  whole  realm 
might  be  in  a  general  uproar."  And  they  repeat  their  opinion  that 
they  must  be  prepared  for  a  "universal  Irish  war,  intended  to 
shake  off  all  English  government." 

In  April,  1598,  Tyrone  received  a  new  pardon  ;  in  the  following 
August  he  surprised  an  English  army  near  Armagh,  and  shattered 
it  with  a  defeat  the  bloodiest  and  most  complete  ever  received  by 
the  English  in  Ireland.  Then  the  storm  burst.  Tyrone  sent  a 
force  into  Munster  ;  and  once  more  Munster  rose.  It  was  a  rising 
of  the  dispossessed  proprietors  and  the  whole  native  population 
agamst  the  English  undertakers  ;  a  "ragged  number  of  rogues  and 
boys,"  as  the  English  Council  describes  them  ;  rebel  kernes,  pour- 
ing out  of  the  "great  wood,"  and  from  Arlo,  the  "  chief  fastness  of 
the  rebels."  Even  the  chiefs,  usually  on  good  terms  with  the 
English,  could  not  resist  the  stream.  Even  Thomas  Norreys,  the 
President,  was  surprised,  and  retired  to  Cork,  bringing  down  on 
himself  a  severe  reprimand  from  the  English  Government.  "You 
might  better  have  resisted  than  you  did,  considering  the  many 
defensible  houses  and  castles  possessed  by  the  undertakers,  who, 
for  aught  we  can  hear,  were  by  no  means  comforted  nor  supported 
by  you,  but  either  from  lack  of  comfort  from  you,  or  out  of  mere 
cowardice,  fled  away  from  the  rebels  on  the  first  alarm."  "  Where- 
upon," says  Cox,  the  Irish  historian,  "  the  Munsterians,  generally, 
rebel  in  October,  and  kill,  murder,  ravish  and  spoil  without  mercy ; 
and  Tyrone  made  James  Fitz-Thomas  Earl  of  Desmond,  on  condi- 
tion to  be  tributary  to  him  ;  he  was  the  handsomest  man  of  his 
time,  and  is  commonly  called  the  Sugan  Earl." 

On  the  last  day  of  the  previous  September  (Sept.  30,  1598),  the 
English  Council  had  written  to  the  Irish  Government  to  appoint 
Edmund  Spenser,  Sheriff  of  the  County  of  Cork,  "  a  gentleman 
dwelling  in  the  County  of  Cork,  who  is  so  well  known  unto  you  all 
for  his  good  and  commendable  parts,  being  a  man  endowed  with 
good  knowledge  in  learning,  and  not  unskilful  or  without  experi- 
ence in  the  wars."  In  October,  Munster  was  in  the  hands  of  the 
insurgents,  who  were  driving  Norreys  before  them,  and  sv/eeping 
out  of  house  and  castle  the  panic-stricken  English  settlers.  On 
December  9th,  Norreys  wrote  home  a  despatch  about  the  state  of 
the  province.  This  despatch  was  sent  to  England  by  Spenser,  as 
we  learn  from  a  subsequent  despatch  of  Norreys  of  December  21.* 

*  I  am  indebted  for  this  reference  to  Mr.  Hans  Claude  Hamilton.  See  also  his  Preface 
to  Calendar  of  Irish  Papers,  1574-85,  p.  Ixxvi. 


126 


SPENSER. 


It  was  received  at  Whitehall,  as  appears  from  Robert  Cecil's  en- 
dorsement, on  the  24th  of  December.  The  passage  from  Ireland 
seems  to  have  been  a  long  one.  And  this  is  the  last  original  docu- 
ment which  remains  about  Spenser. 

What  happened  to  him  in  the  rebellion  we  learn  generally  from 
two  sources,  from  Camden's  History^  and  from  Drummond  of 
Havvthornden's  Recollections  of  Ben  Jonson's  conversations  with 
him  in  1619.  In  the  Munster  insurrection  of  October,  the  new 
Earl  of  Desmond's  followers  did  not  forget  that  Kilcolman  was  an 
old  possession  of  the  Desmonds.  It  was  sacked  and  burnt.  Jonson 
related  that  a  little  new-born  child  of  Spenser's  perished  in  the 
flames.  Spenser  and  his  wife  escaped,  and  he  came  over  to  Eng- 
land, a  ruined  and  heart-broken  man.  He  died  Jan.  16,  I59f ; 
"he  died,"  say  Jonson,  "for  lack  of  bread,  in  King  Street  [West- 
minster], and  refused  twenty  pieces  sent  to  him  by  my  Lord  of 
Essex,  saying  that  he  had  no  time  to  spend  them."  He  was  buried 
in  the  Abbey,  near  the  grave  of  Chaucer,  and  his  funeral  was  at 
the  charge  of  the  Earl  of  Essex.  Beyond  this  we  know  nothing ; 
nothing  about  the  details  of  his  escape,  nothing  of  the  fate  of  his 
manuscripts,  or  the  condition  in  v/hich  he  left  his  work,  nothing 
about  the  suffering  he  went  through  in  England.  All  conjecture 
is  idle  waste  of  time.  We  only  know  that  the  first  of  English 
poets  perished  miserably  and  prematurely,  one  of  the  many  heavy 
sacrifices  which  the  evil  fortune  of  Ireland  has  cost  to  England  ; 
one  of  many  illustrious  victims  to  the  madness,  the  evil  customs, 
the  vengeance  of  an  ill-treated  and  ill-governed  people. 

One  Irish  rebellion  brought  him  to  Ireland,  another  drove  him 
out  of  it.  Desmond's  brought  him  to  pass  his  life  there,  and  to 
fill  his  mind  with  the  images  of  what  was  then  Irish  life,  with  its 
scenery,  its  antipathies,  its  tempers,  its  chances,  and  necessities. 
Tyrone's  swept  him  from  Ireland,  beggared  and  hopeless.  Ten 
years  after  his  death,  a  bookseller,  reprinting  the  six  books  of  the 
Faerie  Queene^  added  two  cantos  and  a  fragment.  Oft  Mutability^ 
supposed  to  be  part  of  the  Legend  of  Constancy ,  Where  and  how 
he  got  them  he  has  not  told  us.  It  is  a  strange  and  solemn  medi- 
tation on  the  universal  subjection  of  all  things  to  the  inexorable 
conditions  of  change.  It  is  strange,  with  its  odd  episode  and 
fable  which  Spenser  cannot  resist  about  his  neighbouring  streams, 
its  borrowings  from  Chaucer,  and  its  quaint  mixture  of  mythology 
with  sacred  and  with  Irish  scenery,  Olympus  and  Tabor,  and 
his  own  rivers  and  mountains.  But  it  is  full  of  his  power  over 
thought  and  imagery ;  and  it  is  quite  in  a  different  key  from  any- 
thing in  the  first  six  books.  It  has  an  undertone  of  awe-struck 
and  pathetic  sadness. 

**  What  man  that  sees  the  ever  whirling  wheel 
Of  Change,  the  which  all  mortal  things  doth  sway, 
But  that  thereby  doth  find  and  plainly  feel 
How  Mutability  in  them  doth  play 
Her  cruel  sports  to  many  men's  decay." 


SPENSER. 


it7 


He  imagines  a  mighty  Titaness,  sister  of  Hecate  and  Bellona,  most 
beautiful  and  most  terrible,  who  challenges  universal  dominion 
over  all  things  in  earth  and  heaven,  sun  and  moon,  planet  and  stars, 
times  and  seasons,  life  and  death  ;  and  finally  over  the  wills  and 
thoughts  and  natures  of  the  gods,  even  of  Jove  himself;  and  v/ho 
pleads  her  cause  before  the  awful  Mother  of  all  things,  figured  as 
Chaucer  had  already  imagined  her: 

"  Great  Nature,  ever  young,  yet  full  of  eld  ; 
Still  moving,  yet  unmoved  from  her  stead ; 
Unseen  of  any,  yet  of  all  beheld, 
Thus  sitting  on  her  throne." 

He  imagines  all  the  powers  of  the  upper  and  nether  worlds  assem- 
bled before  her  on  his  own  familiar  hills,  instead  of  Olympus, 
where  she  shone  like  the  Vision  which  "dazed"  those  "three 
sacred  saints  "  on  "  Mount  Thabor."  Before  her  pass  all  things 
known  of  men,  in  rich  and  picturesque  procession  ;  the  Seasons 
pass,  and  the  Months,  and  the  Hours,  and  Day  and  Night,  Life, 
as  "a  fair  young  lusty  boy,"  Death,  grim  and  grisly — 

Yet  is  he  nought  but  parting  of  the  breath, 
Ne  ought  to  see,  but  like  a  shade  to  weene, 
Unbodied,  unsoul'd,  unheard,  unseene — " 

and  on  all  of  them  the  claims  of  Titaness,  Mutability,  are  acknowl- 
edged. Nothing  escapes  her  sway  in  this  present  state,  except 
Nature,  which,  while  seeming  to  change,  never  really  changes  her 
ultimate  constituent  element,  or  her  universal  laws.  But  when  she 
seemed  to  have  extorted  the  admission  of  her  powers,  Nature 
silences  her.  Change  is  apparent,  and  not  real;  and  the  time  is 
coming  when  all  change  shall  end  in  the  final  changeless  change. 

"  *  I  well  consider  all  that  ye  have  said, 
And  find  that  all  things  stedfastnesse  do  hate 
And  changed  be  ;  yet,  being  rightly  wayd, 
They  are  not  changed  from  their  first  estate  ; 
But  by  their  change  their  being  do  dilate, 
And  turning  to  themselves  at  length  againe, 
Do  worke  their  owne  perfection  so  by  fate  : 
Then  over  them  Change  doth  not  rule  and  raigne, 
But  they  raigne  over  Change,  and  do  their  states  maintain*. 

"  *  Cease  therefore,  daughter,  further  to  aspire, 
And  thee  content  thus  to  be  rul'd  by  mee, 
For  thy  decay  thou  seekst  by  thy  desire ; 
But  time  shall  come  that  all  shall  changed  bee, 
And  from  thenceforth  none  no  more  change  shal  see.' 
So  was  the  Titaiiesse  put  downe  and  whist, 
And  Jove  confirm'd  in  his  imperiall  see. 
Then  was  that  whole  assembly  quite  dismist, 
And  Natur's  selfe  did  vanish,  whither  no  man  wist." 


ii8 


SPENSER. 


What  he  meant — how  far  he  was  thinking  of  those  daring  argu- 
ments of  rehgious  and  philosophical  change  of  which  the  world 
was  beginning  to  be  full,  we  cannot  now  tell.  The  allegory  was 
not  finished  :  at  least  it  is  lost  to  uso  We  have  but  a  fragment 
more  the  last  fragment  of  his  poetry.  It  expresses  the  great  com- 
monplace which  so  impressed  itself  on  the  men  of  that  time,  and 
of  which  his  works  are  full.  No  words  could  be  more  appropriate 
to  be  the  last  words  of  one  who  was  so  soon  to  be  in  his  own  per- 
son such  an  instance  of  their  truth.  They  are  fit  closing  words 
to  mark  his  tragic  and  pathetic  disappearance  from  the  high  and 
animated  scene  in  which  his  imagination  worked.  And  they  re- 
cord, too,  the  yearning  hope  of  rest  not  extinguished  by  terrible 
and  fatal  disaster : 

"  When  I  bethinke  me  on  that  speech  whyleare 
Of  Mutabilitie,  and  well  it  way, 
Me  seemes,  that  though  she  all  unworthy  were 
Of  the  Heav*ns  Rule  ;  yet,  very  sooth  to  say, 
In  all  things  else  she  beares  the  greatest  sway : 
Which  makes  me  loath  this  state  of  life  so  tickle, 
And  love  of  things  so  vaine  to  cast  away  ; 
Whose  flowring  pride,  so  fading  and  so  fickle, 
Short  Time  shall  soon  cut  down  with  his  consuming  sickle. 

"  Then  gin  I  thinke  on  that  which  Nature  sayd, 
Of  that  same  time  when  no  more  Change  shall  be, 
But  stedfast  rest  of  all  things,  firmely  stayd 
Upon  the  pillours  of  Eternity, 
That  is  contrayr  to  Mutabilitie; 
For  all  that  moveth  doth  in  Change  delight ; 
But  thenceforth  all  shall  rest  eternally 
With  Him  that  is  the  God  of  Sabaoth  hight  : 
O !  that  great  Sabaoth  God,  grant  me  that  Sabaoths  sight.** 


THE  END. 


WALTER  SCOTT 
From  Ihe  Original  Painting  by  Sir  Thomas  Lawrence 


R  WALTER  SCOTT 

BY 

RICHARD  H.  HUTTON 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


CHAPTER  I 


ANCESTRY,  PARENTAGE,  AND  CHILDHOOD. 

Sir  Walter  Scott  was  the  first  literary  man  of  a  great 
riding,  sporting,  and  fighting  clan.  Indeed,  his  father — a  Writer  to 
the  Signet,  or  Edinburgh  solicitor — was  the  first  of  his  race  to 
adopt  a  town  life  and  a  sedentary  profession.  Sir  Walter  was  the 
lineal  descendant — six  generations  removed — of  that  Walter  Scott 
commemorated  in  The  Lay  of  the  Last  Mijistrel^  who  is  known  in 
Border  history  and  legend  as  Auld  Wat  of  Harden.  Auld  Wat's 
son  William,  captured  by  Sir  Gideon  Murray,  of  Elibank,  during 
a  raid  of  the  Scotts  on  Sir  Gideon's  lands,  was,  as  tradition  says, 
given  his  choice  between  being  hanged  on  Sir  Gideon's  private 
gallows,  and  marrying  the  ugliest  of  Sir  Gideon's  three  ugly 
daughters,  Meikle-mouthed  Meg,  reputed  as  carrying  off  the  prize 
of  ugliness  among  the  women  of  four  counties.  Sir  William  was 
a  handsome  man.  He  took  three  days  to  consider  the  alternative 
proposed  to  him,  but  he  chose  life  v/ith  the  large-mouthed  lady  in 
the  end ;  and  found  her,  according  to  the  tradition  which  the  poet, 
her  descendant,  has  transmitted,  an  excellent  wife,  with  a  fine  tal- 
ent for  pickling  the  beef  which  her  husband  stole  from  the  herds 
of  his  foes.  Meikle-mouthed  Meg  transmitted  a  distinct  trace  of 
her  large  mouth  to  all  her  descendants,  and  not  least  to  him  who 
was  to  use  his  "  meikle  "  mouth  to  best  advantage  as  the  spokes- 
man of  his  race.  Rather  more  than  half-way  between  Auld  Wat 
of  Harden^s  times — i.  e.,  the  middle  of  the  sixteenth  century — and 
those  of  Sir  Walter  Scott,  poet  and  novelist,  lived  Sir  Walter's 
great-grandfather,  Walter  Scott  generally  known  in  Teviotdale  by 
the  surname  of  Beardie,  because  he  would  never  cut  his  beard 
after  the  banishment  of  the  Stuarts,  and  who  took  arms  in  their 
cause  and  lost  by  his  intrigues  on  their  behalf  almost  all  that  he 
had,  besides  running  the  greatest  risk  of  being  hanged  as  a  traitor. 
This  was  the  ancestor  of  whom  Sir  Walter  speaks  m  the  introduc- 
tion to  the  last  canto  of  MajDiion : — 


10 


S/J^  WALTER  SCOTT. 


**  And  thus  my  Christmas  still  I  hold, 
Where  my  great  graiidsire  came  of  old. 
With  amber  beard  and  flaxen  hair, 
And  reverend  apostolic  air, — 
The  feast  and  holy  tide  to  share, 
And  mix  sobriety  with  wine, 
And  honest  mirth  with  thoughts  divine 
Small  thought  was  his  in  after  time 
E'er  to  be  hitch'd  into  a  rhyme, 
The  simple  sire  could  only  boast 
That  he  was  loyal  to  his  cost ; 
The  banish'd  race  of  kings  revered. 
And  lost  his  land — but  kept  his  beard." 

Sir  Walter  inherited  from  Beardie  that  sentimental  Stuart  bia*5 
which  his  better  judgment  condemned,  but  which  seemed  to  be 
rather  part  of  his  blood  than  of  his  mind.  And  most  useful  to 
him  this  sentiment  undoubtedly  was  in  helping  him  to  restore  the 
mould  and  fashion  of  the  past.  Beardie's  second  son  was  Sir 
Walter's  grandfather,  and  to  him  he  owed  not  only  his  first  child- 
ish experience  of  the  delights  of  country  life,  but  also, — in  his  own 
estimation  at  least, — that  risky,  speculative,  and  sanguine  spirit 
v;hich  had  so  much  influence  over  his  fortunes.  The  good  man  of 
Sandy-Knowe,  wishing  to  breed  sheep,  and  being  destitute  of  cap- 
ital borrowed  30/.  from  a  shepherd  who  was  willing  to  invest  that 
sum  for  him  in  sheep ;  and  the  two  set  off  to  purchase  a  flock  near 
Wooler,  in  Northumberland  ;  but  when  the  shepherd  had  found 
what  he  thought  would  suit  their  purpose,  be  returned  to  find  his 
master  galloping  about  a  fine  hunter,  on  which  he  had  spent  the 
whole  capital  in  hand.  This  speculation,  however,  prospered.  A 
few  days  later  Robert  Scott  displayed  the  qualities  of  the  hunter 
to  such  admirable  effect  with  John  Scott  of  Harden's  hounds,  that 
he  sold  the  horse  for  double  the  money  he  had  given,  and,  unlike 
his  grandson,  abandoned  speculative  purchases  there  and  then.  In 
the  latter  days  of  his  clouded  fortunes,  after  Ballantyne's  and  Con- 
stable's failure,  Sir  Walter  was  accustomed  to  point  to  the  picture 
of  his  grandfather  and  say,  "  Blood  will  out :  my  building  and 
planting  was  but  his  buying  the  hunter  before  he  stocked  his 
sheep-walk,  over  again."  But  Sir  Walter  added,  says  Mr.  Lock- 
hart,  as  he  glanced  at  the  likeness  of  his  own  staid  and  prudent 
father,  "  Yet  it  was  a  wonder,  too,  for  I  have  a  thread  of  the  at- 
torney in  me,"  which  was  doubtless  the  case  ;  nor  was  that  thread 
the  least  of  his  inheritances,  for  from  his  father  certainly  Sir  Wal- 
ter derived  that  disposition  towards  conscientious,  plodding  indus- 
try, legalism  of  mind,  methodical  habits  of  work,  and  a  generous, 
equitable  interpretation  of  the  scope  of  all  his  obligations  to  others, 
which,  prized  and  cultivated  by  him  as  they  were,  turned  a  great 
genius,  which,  especially  considering  the  hare-brained  element  in 
him,  might  easily  have  been  frittered  away  or  devoted  to  v/orthless 
ends,  to  such  fruitful  account,  and  stamped  it  with  so  grand  an  im- 
press of  personal  magnanimity  and  fortitude.    Sir  Walter's  fathei 


WALTER  SCOTT. 


II 


reminds  one  in  not  a  few  of  the  formal  and  rather  marlinetish  traits 
which  are  related  of  him,  of  the  father  of  Goethe,  "a  formal  man, 
with  strong  ideas  of  strait-laced  education,  passionately  orderly 
(he  thought  a  good  book  nothing  without  a  good  binding),  and 
never  so  much  excited  as  by  a  necessary  deviation  from  the  *  pre- 
established  harmony '  of  household  rules,"  That  description 
would  apply  almost  wholly  to  the  sketch  of  old  Mr.  Scott  which  the 
novelist  has  given  us  under  the  thin  disguise  of  Alexander  Fair- 
ford,  Writer  to  the  Signet,  in  Redgaunilet^  a  figure  confessedly 
meant,  in  its  chief  features,  to  represent  his  father.  To  this  Sir 
Walter  adds,  in  one  of  his  later  journals,  the  trait  that  his  father 
was  a  man  of  fine  presence,  who  conducted  all  conventional  ar- 
rangements v^ith  a  certain  grandeur  and  dignity  of  air,  and  ''abso- 
lutely loved  a  funeral."  "  He  seemed  to  preserve  the  list  of  a  whole 
bead-roll  of  cousins  merely  for  the  pleasure  of  being  at  their 
funerals,  which  he  was  often  asked  to  superintend,  and  I  suspect 
had  sometimes  to  pay  for.  He  carried  me  with  him  as  often  as  he 
could  to  these  mortuary  ceremonies ;  but  feeling  I  was  not,  like 
iiim,  either  useful  or  ornamental,  I  escaped  as  often  as  I  could." 
This  strong  dash  of  the  conventional  in  Scott's  father,  this  satis- 
faction in  seeing  people  fairly  to  the  door  of  life,  and  taking  his 
final  leave  of  them  there,  with  something  of  a  ceremonious  flourish 
of  observance,  was,  however,  combined  with  a  much  nobler  and 
deeper  kind  of  orderliness.  Sir  Walter  used  to  say  that  his  father 
had  lost  no  small  part  of  a  very  flourishing  business,by  insisting  that 
his  clients  should  do  their  duty  to  their  own  people  better  than 
they  were  themselves  at  all  inclined  to  do  it.  And  of  this  gener- 
ous strictness  in  sacrificing  his  own  interests  to  his  sympathy  for 
others,  the  son  had  as  much  as  the  father. 

Sir  Walter's  mother,  who  was  a  Miss  Rutherford,  the  daughter 
of  a  physician,  had  been  better  educated  than  most  Scotchwomen 
of  her  day,  in  spite  of  having  been  sent  "to  be  finished  off"  by 
"  the  honourable  Mrs.  Ogilvie,"  whose  training  was  so  effective, 
in  one  direction  at  least,  that  even  in  her  eightieth  year  Mrs.  Scott 
could  not  enjoy  a  comfortable  rest  in  her  chair,  but  ''took  as  much 
care  to  avoid  touching  her  chair  with  her  back,  as  if  she  had  still 
been  under  the  stern  eyes  of  Mrs.  Ogilvie."  None  the  less  Mrs. 
Scott  was  a  motherly,  comfortable  woman,  with  much  tenderness  of 
heart,  and  a  well-stored,  vivid  memory.  Sir  Walter,  writing  of  her, 
after  his  m.other  s  death,  to  Lady  Louisa  Stewart,  says,  "She  had 
a  mind  peculiarly  well  stored  with  much  acquired  information  and 
natural  talent,  and  as  she  was  very  old,  and  had  an  excellent 
memory,  she  could  draw%  without  the  least  exaggeration  or  aft'ec- 
tation,the  most  striking  pictures  of  the  past  age.  If  I  have  been 
able  to  do  anything  in  the  way  of  painting  the  past  times,  it  is  very 
much  from  the  studies  with  which  she  presented  me.  She  con- 
nected a  long  period  of  time  with  the  present  generation,  for  she 
remembered,  and  had  often  spoken  with,  a  person  who  perfectly 
recollected  the  battle  of  Dunbar  and  Oliver  Cromw^ell's  subsequent 
entry  into  Edinburgh."    On  the  day  before  the  stroke  of  paralysis 


12 


S/A'  WALTER  SCOT'/. 


which  carried  her  off,  she  had  told  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Scott  of  Harden^ 
*'with  great  accuracy,  the  real  story  of  the  Bride  of  Lammermuir, 
and  pointed  out  wherein  it  differed  from  the  novel.  She  had  all 
the  names  of  the  parties,  and  pointed  out  (for  she  was  a  great 
genealogist)  their  connexion  with  existing  families."*  Sir  Walter 
records  many  evidences  of  the  tenderness  of  his  mother's  nature, 
and  he  returned  warmly  her  affection  for  himself.  His  executors, 
in  lifting  up  his  desk,  the  evening  after  his  burial,  found  arranged 
in  careful  order  a  series  of  little  objects,  which  had  obviously  been 
so  placed  there  that  his  eye  miglit  rest  on  them  every  morning 
before  he  began  his  tasks.  These  were  the  old-fashioned  boxes 
that  had  garnished  his  mother's  toilette,  when  he,  a  sickly  child, 
slept  in  her  dressing-room, — the  silver  taper-stand,  which  the  young 
advocate  had  bought  for  her  with  his  first  five-guinea  fee, — a  row 
of  small  packets  inscribed  with  her  hand,  and  containing  the  hair 
of  those  of  her  offspring  that  had  died  before  her, — his  father's 
snuff-box,  and  etui-case, — and  more  things  of  the  sort.^'  f  A  story, 
characteristic  of  both  Sir  Walter's  parents,  is  told  by  Mr.  Lockhart 
which  will  serve  better  than  anything  I  can  remember  to  bring  the 
father  and  mother  of  Scott  vividly  before  the  imagination.  His 
father,  like  Mr.  Alexander  Fairford,  in  Redgaiintlet^  though  him- 
self a  strong  Hanoverian,  inherited  enough  feeling  for  the  Stuarts 
from  his  grandfather  Beardie,  and  sympathised  enough  with  those 
who  were,  as  he  neutrally  expressed  it,  "out  in  '45,"  to  ignore  as 
much  as  possible  any  phrases  offensive  to  the  Jacobites.  For  in- 
stance, he  always  called  Charles  Edward  not  the  Pretefider  but  the 
Chevalier —  2ivA  he  did  business  for  many  Jacobites  : — 

Mrs.  Scott's  curiosity  was  strongly  excited  one  autumn  by  the  regular 
appearance  at  a  certain  hour  every  evening  of  a  sedan  chair,  to  deposit  a 
person  carefully  muffled  up  in  a  mantle,  who  was  immediately  ushered 
into  her  husband's  private  room,  and  commonly  remained  with  him  there 
until  long  after  the  usual  bed-time  of  this  orderly  family.  Mr.  Scott  an- 
swered her  repeated  inquiries  with  a  vagueness  that  irritated  the  lady's 
feelings  more  and  more  ;  until  at  last  she  could  bear  the  thing  no  longer  ; 
but  one  evening,  just  as  she  heard  the  bell  ring  as  for  the  stranger's  chair 
to  carry  him  off,  she  made  her  appearance  within  the  forbidden  parlour  with 
a  salver  in  her  hand,  observing  that  she  thought  the  gentlemen  had  sat  so 
long  they  would  be  better  of  a  dish  of  tea,  and  had  ventured  accordingly 
to  bring  some  for  their  acceptance.  The  stranger,  a  person  of  distin- 
guished appearance,  and  richly  dressed,  bowed  to  the  lady  and  accepted  a 
cup;  but  her  husband  knit  his  brows,  and  refused  very  coldly  to  partake 
the  refreshment,  A  moment  afterwards  the  visitor  withdrew^,  and  Mr, 
Scott,  lifting  up  the  window-sash,  took  the  cup,  which  he  had  left  empty 
on  the  table,  and  tossed  it  out  upon  the  pavement.  The  lady  exclaimed 
for  her  china,  but  was  put  to  silence  by  her  husband's  saying,  *  I  can 
forgive  your  little  curiosity,  madam,  but  you  must  pay  the  penalty.  I  may 
admit  into  my  house,  on  a  piece  of  business,  persons  wholly  unworthy  to 
be  treated  as  guests  l)y  my  wife.  Neither  lip  of  me  nor  of  mine  comes 
after  Mr.  Murray  of  Broughton's.' 

Lockhart's  Life  of  Scott,  vi.  172-3.  The  edition  referred  tc  is  throughout  the 
edition  of  1839  in  ten  volumes. 

>  Lockhart's  Life  of  Scott,  x.  241. 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT, 


13 


"This  was  the  unhappy  man  who,  after  attending  Prince  Charles 
Stuart  as  his  secretary  throughout  the  greater  part  of  his  expedition,  con- 
descended to  redeem  his  own  life  and  fortune  by  bearing  evidence  against 
the  noblest  of  his  late  master's  adherents,  when — 

"  Pitied  by  gentle  hearts,  Kilmarnock  died, 
The  brave,  Balmerino  were  on  thy  side."* 

"Broughton's  saucer" — i.  e.  the  saucer  belonging  to  the  cup 
thus  sacrificed  by  Mr.  Scott  to  his  indignation  against  one  who  had 
redeemed  his  own  life  and  fortune  by  turning  king's  evidence 
against  one  of  Prince  Charles  Stuart's  adherents, — was  carefully 
preserved  by  his  son,  and  hung  up  in  his  first  study,  or  "  den," 
under  a  little  print  of  Prince  Charlie.  This  anecdote  brings  before 
the  mind  very  vividly  the  character  of  Sir  Walter's  parents.  The 
eager  curiosity  of  the  active-minded  woman,  whom  "the  honour- 
able Mrs.  Ogiivie  "  had  been  able  to  keep  upright  in  her  chair  for 
life,  but  not  to  cure  of  the  desire  to  unravel  the  little  mysteries  oi 
which  she  had  a  passing  glimpse;  the  grave  formality  of  the  hus- 
band, fretting  under  his  wife  s  personal  attention  to  a  dishonoured 
man,  and  making  her  pay  the  penalty  by  dashing  to  pieces  the 
cup  which  the  king's  evidence  had  used, — again,  the  visitor 
himself,  perfectly  conscious  no  doubt  that  the  Hanoverian  lawyer 
held  him  in  utter  scorn  for  his  faithlessness  and  cowardice,  and 
reluctant,  nevertheless,  to  reject^ the  courtesy  of  the  wife,  though 
he  could  not  get  anything  but  cold  legal  advice  from  the  husband  : 
— all  these  are  figures  which  must  have  acted  on  the  youthful 
imagination  of  the  poet  with  singular  vivacity,  and  shaped  them- 
selves in  a  hundred  changing  turns  of  the  historical  kaleidoscope 
which  was  always  before  his  mind's  eye,  as  he  mused  upon  that 
past  which  he  was  to  restore  for  us  with  almost  more  than  its 
original  freshness  of  life.  With  such  scenes  touching  even  his 
own  home,  Scott  must  have  been  constantly  taught  to  balance  in 
his  own  mind,  the  more  romantic,  against  the  more  sober  and 
rational  considerations,  which  had  so  recently  divided  house 
against  house,  even  in  the  same  family  and  clan.  That  the  stern 
Calvinistic  lawyer  should  have  retained  so  much  of  his  grandfather 
Beardie's  respect  for  the  adherents  of  the  exiled  house  of  Stuart, 
must  in  itself  have  struck  the  boy  as  even  more  remarkable  than 
the  passionate  loyalty  of  the  Stuarts'  professed  partisans,  and  have 
lent  a  new  sanction  of  the  romantic  drift  of  his  mother's  old 
traditions,  and  one  to  which  they  must  have  been  indebted  for  a 
great  part  of  their  fascination. 

Walter  Scott,  the  ninth  of  twelve  children,  of  whom  the  first 
six  died  in  early  childhood,  was  born  in  Edinburgh,  on  the  15th  of 
August,  1 771.  Of  the  six  later-born  children,  all  but  one  were 
boys,  and  the  one  sister  was  a  somewhat  querulous  invalid,  whom 
he  seems  to  have  pitied  almost  more  than  he  loved.  At  the  age  of 
eighteen  months  the  boy  had  a  teething-fever,  ending  in  a  life-long 


JUockhart's  Li/e  0/  Scott ^  i.  243-4. 


14 


S/A'  WALTER  SCOTT. 


lameness  ;  and  this  was  the  reason  why  the  child  was  sent  to  reside 
with  his  grandfather — the  speculative  grandfather,  who  had  doubled 
his  capital  by  buying  a  racehorse  instead  of  sheep — at  Sandy- 
Knowe,  near  the  ruined  tower  of  Smailholm,  celebrated  afterwards 
in  his  ballad  of  The  Eve  of  St.  JoJdi^  in  the  neighborhood  of  some 
fine  crags.  To  these  crags  the  housemaid  sent  from  Edinburgh  to 
look  after  him,  used  to  carry  him  up,  with  a  design  (which  she  con- 
fessed to  the  housekeeper) — due,  of  course,  to  incipient  insanity — 
of  murdering  the  child  there,  and  burying  him  in  the  moss.  Of 
course  the  maid  was  dismissed.  After  this  the  child  used  to  be 
sent  out,  when  the  weather  was  fine,  in  the  safer  charge  of  the 
shepherd,  who  would  often  lay  him  beside  the  sheep.  Long  after- 
wards Scott  told  Mr.  Skene,  during  an  excursion  with  Turner,  the 
great  painter,  who  was  drawing  his  illustration  of  Smailholm  tower 
for  one  of  Scott's  works,  that  "  the  habit  of  lying  on  the  turf  there 
among  the  sheep  and  the  lambs  had  given  his  mind  a  peculiar 
tenderness  for  these  animals,  which  it  had  ever  since  retained.'' 
Being  forgotten  one  day  upon  the  knolls  when  a  thunderstorm 
came  on,  his  aunt  ran  out  to  bring  him  in,  and  found  him  shouting, 
''Bonny!  bonny !"  at  every  flash  of  lightning.  One  of  the  old 
servants  at  Sandy-Knowe  spoke  of  the  child  long  afterwards  as  "a 
sweet-tempered  bairn,  a  darling  with  all  about  the  house,"  and  cer- 
tainly the  miniature  taken  of  him  in  his  seventh  year  confirms  the 
impression  thus  given.  It  is  sweet-tempered  above  everything, 
and  only  the  long  upper-lip  and  large  mouth,  derived  from  his 
ancestress,  Meg  Murray,  convey  the  promise  of  the  power  which 
was  in  him.  Of  course  the  high,  almost  conical  forehead,  which 
gained  him  in  his  later  days  from  his  comrades  at  the  bar  the  name 
of  "  Old  Peveril,"  in  allusion  to  "  the  peak  "  which  they  saw  tower- 
ing high  above  the  heads  of  other  men  as  he  approached,  is  not  so 
much  marked  beneath  the  childish  locks  of  this  miniature  as  it  was 
in  later  life ;  and  the  massive,  and,  in  repose,  certainly  heavy  face 
of  his  maturity,  which  conveyed  the  impression  of  the  great  bulk 
of  his  character,  is  still  quite  invisible  under  the  sunny  ripple  of 
childish  earnestness  and  gaiety.  Scott's  hair  in  childhood  was 
light  chestnut,  which  turned  to  nut-brown  in  youth.  His  eyebrows 
were  bushy,  for  we  find  mention  made  of  them  as  a  "  pent-house.*' 
His  eyes  were  always  light  blue.  They  had  in  them  a  capacity,  on 
the  one  hand,  for  enthusiasm,  sunny  brightness,  and  even  hare- 
brained humour,  and  on  the  other  for  expressing  determined  re- 
solve and  kindly  irony,  which  gave  great  range  of  expression  to  the 
face.  There  are  plenty  of  materials  for  judging  what  sort  of  a  boy 
Scott  was.  In  spite  of  his  lameness,  he  early  taught  himself  to 
clamber  about  with  an  agility  that  few  children  could  have  sur- 
passed, and  to  sit  his  first  pony-  a  little  Shetland,  not  bigger  than 
a  large  Newfoundland  dog,  which  used  to  come  into  the  house  to 
be  fed  by  him — even  in  gallops  on  very  rough  ground.  He  be- 
came very  early  a  declaimer.  Having  learned  the  ballad  of  Hardy 
Knutc,  he  shouted  it  forth  with  such  pertinacious  enthusiasm  that 
the  clergyman  of  his  grandfather's  parish  complained  that  he 


S/M  WALTER  SCOTT. 


"might  as  well  speak  in  a  cannon's  mouth  as  where  that  child 
was."  At  six  years  of  age  Mrs.  Cockburn  described  him  as  the 
most  astounding  genius  of  a  boy  she  ever  saw.  "  He  was  reading 
a  poem  to  his  mother  when  I  went  in.  I  made  him  read  on  :  it 
was  the  description  of  a  shipwreck.  His  passion  rose  with  the 
storm.  *  There's  the  mast  gone/ says  he;  'crash  it  goes;  they 
will  all  perish.'  After  his  agitation  he  turns  to  me,  *  That  is  too 
melancholy/  says  he  ;  *  I  had  better  read  you  something  more 
amusing.'"  And  after  the  call,  he  told  his  aunt  he  liked  Mrs. 
Cockburn,  for  "  she  was  a  virtuoso  hke  himself."  "  Dear  Walter," 
says  Aunt  Jenny,  "  what  is  virtuoso  ?  "  "  Don't  you  know  ?  Why, 
it's  one  who  wishes  and  will  know  everything."  This  last  scene 
took  place  in  his  father's  house  in  Edinburgh  ;  but  Scott's  life  at 
Sandy-Knowe,  including  even  the  old  minister.  Dr.  Duncan,  who 
so  bitterly  complained  of  the  boy's  ballad-spouting,  is  painted  for 
us,  as  everybody  knows,  in  the  picture  of  his  infancy  given  in  the 
introduction  to  the  third  canto  of  Marmio7i: — 

*  It  was  a  barren  scene  and  wild, 

Where  naked  cliffs  were  rudely  piled 

But  ever  and  anon  between 

Lay  velvet  tufts  of  loveliest  green ; 

And  well  the  lonely  infant  knew 

Recesses  where  the  wall-flower  grew, 

And  honeysuckle  loved  to  crawl 

Up  the  low  crag  and  ruin'd  wall. 

I  deem'd  such  nooks  the  sweetest  shade 

The  sun  in  all  its  round  survey'd ; 

And  still  I  thought  that  shatter'd  tower 

The  mightiest  work  of  human  power; 

And  marvell'd  as  the  aged  hind 

With  some  strange  tale  bewitch'dmy  mind, 

Of  forayers,  who,  with  headlong  force, 

Down  from  that  strength  had  spurr'd  their  horso 

Their  southern  rapine  to  renew, 

Far  in  the  distant  Cheviots  blue, 

And,  home  returning,  fill'd  the  hall 

With  revel,  wassail-rout,  and  brawl. 

Methought  that  still  with  trump  and  clang 

The  gateway's  broken  arches  rang  ; 

Methought  grim  features,  seam'd  with  scars, 

Glared  through  the  window's  rusty  bars; 

And  ever,  by  the  winter  hearth. 

Old  tales  I  heard  of  woe  or  mirth, 

Of  lovers'  slights,  of  ladies'  charms, 

Of  witches'  spells,  of  warriors'  arms, 

Of  patriot  battles,  won  of  old 

By  Wallace  wight  and  Bruce  the  bold; 

Of  later  fields  of  feud  and  fight. 

When,  pouring  from  their  Highland  height, 

The  Scottish  clans,  in  headlong  sway, 

Had  swept  the  scarlet  ranks  away. 

While,  stretch'd  at  length  upon  the  floor, 


i6 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT', 


Again  I  fought  each  combat  o'er, 
Pebbles  and  shells  in  order  laid, 
The  mimic  ranks  of  war  display'd ; 
And  onward  still  the  Scottish  lion  bore, 
And  still  the  scatter'd  Southron  fled  before. 
Still,  with  vain  fondness,  could  I  trace 
Anew  each  kind  familiar  face 
That  brighten'd  at  our  evening  fire ! 
From  the  thatch'd  mansion's  grey-hair'd  sire, 
Wise  without  learning,  plain  and  good, 
And  sprung  of  Scotland's  gentler  blood ; 
Whose  eye  in  age,  quick,  clear,  and  keen, 
Shovv'd  what  in  youth  its  glance  had  been ; 
Whose  doom  discording  neighbours  sought, 
Content  with  equity  unbought; 
To  him  the  venerable  priest. 
Our  frequent  and  familiar  guest, 
Whose  life  and  manners  well  could  paint 
Alike  the  student  and  the  saint; 
Alas  !  whose  speech  too  oft  I  broke 
With  gambol  rude  and  timeless  joke; 
For  I  was  wayward,  bold,  and  wild, 
A  self-wili'd  imp,  a  grandame's  child  ; 
But,  half  a  plague  and  half  a  jest, 
Was  still  endured,  beloved,  caress'd." 

A  picture  this  of  a  child  of  great  spirit,  though  with  that  spirit 
Tkr-its  combined  an  active  and  subduing  sweetness  which  could  often 
conquer,  as  by  a  sudden  spell,  those  whom  the  boy  loved.  Towards 
those,  however,  whom  he  did  not  love  he  could  be  vindictive. 
His  relative,  the  laird  of  Raeburn,  on  one  occasion  wrung  the  neck 
of  a  pet  starling,  which  the  child  had  partly  tamed.  "  1  flew  at  his 
throat  like  a  wild-cat,"  he  said,  in  recalling  the  circumstance,  fifty 
years  later,  in  his  journal  on  occasion  of  the  old  laird's  death; 
"  and  was  torn  from  him  with  no  little  difficulty."  And,  judging 
from  this  journal,  I  doubt  whether  he  had  ever  really  forgiven  the 
laird  of  Raeburn.  Towards  those  whom  he  loved  but  had  offended, 
his  manner  was  ve'^y  different.  "  I  seldom,"  said  one  of  his  tutors, 
Mr.  Mitchell,  "had  occasion  all  the  time  I  was  in  the  family  to  find 
fault  with  him,  even  for  trifles,  and  only  once  to  threaten  serious 
castigation,  of  which  he  was  no  sooner  aware,  than  he  suddenly 
sprang  up,  threw  his  arms  about  my  neck  and  kissed  me."  And 
the  quaint  old  gentleman  adds  this  commentary  : — "  By  such  gen- 
erous and  noble  conduct  my  displeasure  was  in  a  moment  convert- 
ed into  esteem  and  admiration  ;  my  soul  melted  into  tenderness, 
and  I  was  ready  to  mingle  my  tears  with  his."  This  spontaneous 
and  fascinating  sweetness  of  his  childhood  was  naturally  over* 
shadowed  to  some  extent  in  later  life  by  Scott's  masculine  and 
proud  character,  but  it  was  always  in  him.  And  there  v/as  much 
of  true  character  in  the  child  behind  this  sweetness.  He  had 
wonderful  self-command,  a  peremptory  kind  of  good  sense,  even 
in  his  infancy.  While  yet  a  child  under  six  years  of  age,  hearing 
one  of  the  servants  beginning  to  tell  a  ghost-story  to  another,  and 


S/A'  WALTER  SCOTT. 


well  knowing  that  if  he  listened,  it  would  scare  away  his  night's 
rest,  he  acted  for  himself  with  all  the  promptness  of  an  elder  per- 
son acting  for  him,  and,  in  spite  of  the  fascination  of  the  suljject, 
resolutely  muffled  his  head  in  the  bed-clothes  and  refused  to  hear 
the  tale.  His  sagacity  in  judging  of  the  character  of  others  was 
shown,  too,  even  as  a  school-boy ;  and  once  it  led  him  to  take  an 
advantage  which  caused  him  many  compunctions  in  after-life,  when- 
ever he  recalled  his  skilful  puerile  tactics.  On  one  occasion — I 
tell  the  story  as  he  himself  rehearsed  it  to  Samuel  Rogers,  almost 
at  the  end  of  his  hfe,  after  his  attack  of  apoplexy,  and  just  before 
leaving  England  for  Italy  in  the  hopeless  quest  of  health — he  had 
long  desired  to  get  above  a  school-fellow  in  his  class,  who  defied 
all  his  efforts,  till  Scott  noticed  that  whenever  a  question  was  asked 
of  his  rival,  the  lad's  fingers  grasped  a  particular  button  on  his 
waistcoat,  while  his  mind  went  in  search  of  the  answer.  Scott  ac- 
cordingly anticipated  that  if  he  could  remove  this  button,  the  boy 
would  be  thrown  out,  and  so  it  proved.  The  button  was  cut  off, 
and  the  next  time  the  lad  was  questioned,  his  fingers  being  unable 
to  find  the  button,  and  his  eyes  going  in  perplexed  search  after  his 
fingers,  he  stood  confounded,  and  Scott  mastered  by  strategy  the 
place  he  could  not  gain  by  mere  industry.  "  Often  in  after-life," 
said  Scott,  in  narrating  the  manoeuvre  to  Rogers,  "  has  the  sight 
of  him  smote  me  as  I  passed  by  him  ;  and  often  have  I  resolved  to 
make  him  some  reparation,  but  it  ended  in  good  resolutions. 
Though  I  never  renewed  my  acquaintance  with  him,  I  often  saw 
him,  for  he  filled  some  inferior  office  in  one  of  the  courts  of  law 
at  Edinburgh.  Poor  fellow  !  I  believe  he  is  dead;  he  took  early 
to  drinking."  * 

Scott's  school  reputation  was  one  of  irregular  ability ;  he 
"glanced  like  a  meteor  from  one  end  of  the  class  to  the  other," 
and  received  more  praise  for  his  interpretation  of  the  spirit  of  his 
authors  than  for  his  knowledge  of  their  language.  Out  of  school 
his  fame  stood  higher.  He  extemporized  innumerable  stories  to 
which  his  school-fellows  delighted  to  listen ;  and,  in  spite  of  his 
lameness,  he  was  always  in  the  thick  of  the  "  bickers,"  or  street 
fights  with  the  boys  of  the  town,  and  renowned  for  his  boldness  in 
climbing  the  "  kittle  nine  stanes  "  which  are  projected  high  in  air 
from  the  precipitous  black  granite  of  the  Castle-rock."  At  home 
he  was  much  bullied  by  his  elder  brother  Robert,  a  lively  lad,  not 
without  some  powers  of  verse-making,  who  went  into  the  navy, 
then  in  an  unlucky  moment  passed  into  the  merchant  service  of 
the  East  India  Company,  and  so  lost  the  chance  of  distinguishing 
himself  in  the  great  naval  campaigns  of  Nelson.  Perhaps  Scott 
would  have  been  all  the  better  for  a  sister  a  little  closer  to  him 
tlian  Anne — sickly  and  fanciful — appears  ever  to  have  been.  The 
masculine  side  of  life  appears  to  predominate  a  little  too  much  in 
his  school  and  college  days,  and  he  had  such  vast  energy,  vitality, 
and  pride,  that  his  life  at  this  time  would  have  borne  a  little  taming 


*  Lockhart's  Life  of  Scoit^  i.  128. 


i8 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


under  the  influence  of  a  sister  thoroughly  congenial  to  him.  In 
relation  to  his  studies  he  was  wilful,  though  not  perhaps  perverse. 
He  steadily  declined,  for  instance,  to  learn  Greek,  though  he  mas- 
tered Latin  pretty  fairly.  After  a  time  spent  at  the  High  School, 
Edinburgh,  Scott  was  sent  to  school  at  Kelso,  where  his  master 
made  a  friend  and  companion  of  him,  and  so  poured  into  him  a 
certain  amount  of  Latin  scholarship  which  he  would  never  other- 
wise have  obtained.  I  need  hardly  add  that  as  a  boy  Scott  was,  so 
far  as  a  boy  could  be,  a  Tory — a  worshipper  of  the  past,  and  a 
great  Conservative  of  any  remnant  of  the  past  which  reformers 
wished  to  get  rid  of.  In  the  autobiographical  fragment  of  1808,  he 
says,  in  relation  to  these  school-days,  "  I,  with  my  head  on  fire  for 
chivalry,  was  a  Cavalier ;  my  friend  was  a  Roundhead ;  I  was  a 
Tory,  and  he  was  a  Whig ;  I  hated  Presbyterians,  and  admired 
Montrose  v/ith  his  victorious  Highlanders  ;  he  liked  the  Presby- 
terian Ulysses,  the  deep  and  politic  Argyle  ;  so  that  we  never 
wanted  subjects  of  dispute,  but  our  disputes  were  always  amicable." 
And  he  adds  candidly  enough  :  "  In  all  these  tenets  there  was  no 
real  conviction  on  my  part,  arising  out  of  acquaintance  with  the 

views  or  principles  of  either  party  I  took  up  politics 

at  that  period,  as  King  Charles  II.  did  his  religion,  from  an  idea 
that  the  Cavalier  creed  was  the  more  gentlemanlike  persuasion  of 
the  two."  And  the  uniformly  amicable  character  of  these  contro- 
versies between  the  young  people,  itself  shows  how  much  more  they 
were  controversies  of  the  imagination  than  of  faith.  I  doubt 
whether  Scott's  co?ivictions  on  the  issues  of  the  Past  were  ever 
very  much  more  decided  than  they  were  during  his  boyhood  ; 
though  undoubtedly  he  learned  to  understand  much  more  profoundly 
what  was  really  held  by  the  ablest  men  on  both  sides  of  these  dis- 
puted issues.  The  result,  however,  was,  I  think,  that  while  he 
entered  better  and  better  into  both  sides  as  life  went  on,  he  never 
adopted  either  with  any  earnestness  of  conviction,  being  content 
to  admit,  even  to  himself,  that  while  his  feelings  leaned  in  one  di- 
rection, his  reason  pointed  decidedly  in  the  other;  and  holding 
that  it  was  hardly  needful  to  identify  himself  positively  with  either. 
As  regarded  the  present,  however,  feeling  always  carried  the  day. 
Scott  was  a  Tory  all  his  life. 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


CHAPTER  ir. 

VOUTH — CHOICE  OF  A  PROFESSIOX. 

As  Scott  grew  up,  entered  the  classes  of  the  college,  and 
began  his  legal  studies,  first  as  apprentice  to  his  father,  and  then 
in  the  law  classes  of  the  University,  he  became  noticeable  to  all 
his  friends  for  his  gigantic  memory, — the  rich  stores  of  romantic 
material  with  which  it  was  loaded, — his  giant  feats  of  industry  for 
any  cherished  purpose, — his  delight  in  adventure  and  in  all  athletic 
enterprises, — his  great  enjoyment  of  youthful  "  rows,"  so  long  as 
they  did  not  divide  the  knot  of  friends  to  which  he  belonged,  and 
his  skill  in  peacemaking  amongst  his  own  set.  During  his  appren- 
ticeship his  only  means  of  increasing  his  slender  allowance  with 
funds  which  he  could  devote  to  his  favourite  studies,  was  to  earn 
money  by  copying,  and  he  tells  us  himself  that  he  remembered 
writing  "  120  folio  pages  with  no  interval  either  for  food  or  rest,^' 
fourteen  or  fifteen  hours'  very  hard  work  at  the  very  least, — ex- 
pressly for  this  purpose. 

In  the  second  year  of  Scott's  apprenticeship,  at  about  the  age 
of  sixteen,  he  had  an  attack  of  haemorrhage,  no  recurrence  of  which 
took  place  for  some  forty  years,  but  which  was  then  the  beginning 
of  the  end.  During  this  illness  silence  was  absolutely  imposed 
upon  him, — two  old  ladies  putting  their  fingers  on  their  lips  when- 
ever he  offered  to  speak.  It  was  at  this  time  that  the  lad  began  his 
study  of  the  scenic  side  of  histor}^  and  especially  of  campaigns, 
which  he  illustrated  for  himself  by  the  arrangement  of  shells,  seeds, 
and  pebbles,  so  as  to  represent  encountering  armies,  in  the  manner 
referred  to  (and  referred  to  apparently  in  anticipation  of  a  later 
stage  of  his  life  than  that  he  was  then  speaking  of )  in  the  passage 
from  the  introduction  to  the  third  canto  of  Maruiion  which  I  have 
already  given.  He  also  managed  so  to  arrange  the  looking-glasses 
in  his  room  as  to  see  the  troops  march  out  to  exercise  in  the 
meadows,  as  he  lay  in  bed.  His  reading  was  almost  all  in  the 
direction  of  military  exploit,  or  romance  and  mediaeval  legend  and  the 
later  border  songs  of  his  own  country.  He  learned  Italian  and  read 
Ariosto.  Later  he  learned  Spanish  and  devoured  Cervantes, 
whose  "  novelas^''  he  said,  "  first  inspired  him  with  the  ambition  to 
excel  in  fiction  ;  and  all  that  he  read  and  admired  he  remembered. 
Scott  used  to  illustrate  the  capricious  aftinity  of  his  own  memory 


20 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


for  what  suited  it,  and  its  complete  rejection  of  what  did  not,  by 
old  Beattie  of  Meikledale's  answer  to  a  Scotch  divine^  who  com* 
plimented  him  on  the  strength  of  his  memory.    "  No,  sir,"  said 
the  old  Borderer,     I  have  no  command  of  my  memory.    It  only 
retains  what  hits  my  fancy ;  and  probably,  sir,  if  you  were  to  preach 
to  me  for  two  hours,  I  would  not  be  able,  when  you  finished,  to 
remember  a  word  you  had  been  saying."    Such  a  mem.ory,  when 
it  belongs  to  a  man  of  genius,  is  really  a  sieve  of  the  most  valuable 
kind.    It  sifts  away  what  is  foreign  and  alien  to  his  genius,  and 
assimilates  what  is  suited  to  it.    In  his  very  last  days,  when  he 
was  visiting  Italy  for  the  first  time,  Scott  delighted  in  Malta,  for  it 
recalled  to  him  Vertot's  Knights  ojf  Malta,  and  much  other  mediae- 
val story  which  he  had  pored  over  in  his  youth.    But  when  his 
friends  descanted  to  him  at  Pozzuoli  on  the  Thermae — commonly 
called  the  Temple  of  Serapis — among  the  ruins  of  which  he  stood, 
he  only  remarked  that  he  would  believe  whatever  he  was  told,  "  for 
many  of  his  friends,  and  particularly  Mr.  Morritt,  had  frequently 
tried  to  drive  classical  antiquities,  as  they  are  called,  into  his  head, 
but  they  had  always  found  his  skull  too  thick."    Was  it  not  perhaps 
some  deep  literary  instinct,  like  that  here  indicated,  which  made 
him,  as  a  lad,  refuse  so  steadily  to  learn  Greek,  and  try  to  prove  to 
his  indignant  professor  that  Ariosto  was  superior  to  Homer  ? 
Scott  afterwards  deeply  regretted  this  neglect  of  Greek  ;  but  I 
cannot  help  thinking  that  this  regret  was  misplaced.    Greek  liter- 
ature would  have  brought  before  his  mind  standards  of  poetry  and 
art  which  could  not  but  have  both  deeply  impressed  and  greatly 
daunted  an  intellect  of  so  much  power  ;  I  say  both  impressed  and 
daunted,  because  I  believe  that  Scott  himself  would  never  have 
succeeded  in  studies  of  a  classical  kind,  while  he  might — like 
Goethe  perhaps — have  been  either  misled,  by  admiration  for  that 
school,  into  attempting  what  was  not  adapted  to  his  genius,  or 
else  disheartened  in  the  work  for  which  his  character  and  ancestry 
really  fitted  him.    It  has  been  said  that  there  is  a  real  affinity  be- 
tween Scott  and  Homer.    But  the  long  and  refluent  music  of 
Homer,  once  naturalised  in  his  mind,  would  have  discontented  him 
with  that  quick,  sharp,  metrical  tramp  of  his  own  moss-troopers,  to 
which  alone  his  genius  as  a  poet  was  perfectly  suited. 

It  might  be  supposed  that  with  these  romantic  tastes,  Scott 
could  scarcely  have  made  much  of  a  lawyer,  though  the  inference 
would,  I  believe,  be  quite  mistaken.  His  father,  however,  re- 
proached him  with  being  better  fitted  for  a  pedlar  than  a  lawyer, — 
so  persistently  did  he  trudge  over  all  the  neighbouring  counties  in 
search  of  the  beauties  of  nature  and  the  historic  associations  of 
battle,  siege,  or  legend.  On  one  occasion  when,  with  their  last 
penny  spent,  Scott  and  one  of  his  companions  had  returned  to 
Edinburgh,  living  during  their  last  day  on  drinks  of  milk  offered 
by  generous  peasant-women,  and  the  hi]3s  and  haws  on  the  hedges, 
he  remarked  to  his  father  how  much  he  had  wished  for  George 
Primrose's  power  of  playing  on  the  flute  in  order  to  earn  a  meal  by 
the  way,  old  Mr.  Scott,  catching  grumpily  at  the  idea,  replied,  "  I 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT, 


21 


greatly  doubt,  sir,  you  were  born  for  nae  better  than  a  gangrel 
scrape-gut," — a  speech  which  very  probably  suggested  his  son's 
conception  of  Darsie  Latimer's  adventures  with  the  blind  fiddler, 
Wandering  Willie,  "  in  Redgauntlet.  And,  it  is  true  that  these 
were  the  days  of  mental  and  moral  fermentation,  what  was  called 
in  Germany  the  Sturm-und-Drang,  the  "  fret-and-fury  "  period  of 
Scott's  life,  so  far  as  one  so  mellow  and  genial  in  temper  ever 
passed  through  a  period  of  fret  and  fury  at  all.  In  other  words 
these  were  the  days  of  rapid  motion,  of  walks  of  thirty  miles  a  day 
which  the  lame  lad  yet  found  no  fatigue  to  him  ;  of  mad  enterprises, 
scrapes  and  drinking-bouts,  in  one  of  which  Scott  was  half  per- 
suaded by  his  friends  that  he  actually  sang  a  song  for  the  only  time 
in  his  life.  But  even  in  these  days  of  youthful  sociability,  with 
companions  of  his  own  age,  Scott  v/as  always  himself,  and  his  im- 
perious will  often  asserted  itself.  Writing  of  this  time,  some  thirty- 
five  years  or  so  later,  he  said,  When  I  was  a  boy,  and  on  foot 
expeditions,  as  we  had  many,  no  creature  could  be  so  indifferent 
which  way  our  course  was  directed,  and  I  acquiesced  in  what  any 
one  proposed ;  but  if  I  was  once  driven  to  make  a  choice,  and  felt 
piqued  in  honour  to  maintain  my  proposition,  I  have  broken  off 
from  the  whole  party,  rather  than  yield  to  any  one."  No  doubt, 
too,  in  that  day  of  what  he  himself  described  as  "  the  silly  smart 
fancies  that  ran  in  my  brain  like  the  bubbles  in  a  glass  of  cham- 
pagne, as  brilliant  to  my  thinking,  as  intoxicating  as  evanescent," 
solitude  was  no  real  deprivation  to  him  ;  and  one  can  easily  im.agine 
him  marching  off  on  his  solitary  way  after  a  dispute  with  his  com- 
panions, reciting  to  himself  old  songs  or  ballads,  wnth  that  "notice- 
able but  altogether  indescribable  play  of  the  upper  lip,"  which  Mr. 
Lockhart  thinks  suggested  to  one  of  Scott's  most  intimate  friends, 
on  his  first  acquaintance  with  him,  the  grotesque  notion  that  he  had 
been  "a  hautboy-player."  This  was  the  first  impression  formed 
of  Scott  by  William  Clerk,  one  of  his  earliest  and  life-long  friends. 
It  greatly  amused  Scott,  who  not  only  had  never  played  on  any 
instrument  in  his  life,  but  could  hardly  make  shift  to  join  in  the 
chorus  of  a  popular  song  without  marring  its  effect ;  but  perhaps 
the  impression  suggested  was  not  so  very  far  astray  after  all. 
Looking  to  the  poetic  side  of  his  character,  the  trumpet  certainly 
would  have  been  the  instrument  that  would  have  best  symbolized 
the  spirit  both  of  Scott's  thought  and  of  his  verses.  Mr.  Lockhart 
himself,  in  summing  up  his  impressions  of  Sir  Walter,  quotes  as 
the  most  expressive  of  his  lines  : — 

"  Sound,  sound  the  clarion  !  fill  the  fife ! 
To  all  the  sensual  world  proclaim, 
One  crowded  hour  of  glorious  life 
Is  worth  a  world  without  a  name." 

And  undoubtedly  this  gives  us  the  key-note  of  Scott^s  personal  life 
as  well  as  of  his  poetic  power.  Above  everything  he  was  high- 
spirited,  a  man  of  noble,  and,  at  the  same  time,  of  martial  feelings. 


22 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


Sir  Francis  Doyle  speaks  very  justly  of  Sir  Walter  as  "among 
English  singers  the  undoubted  inheritor  of  that  trumpet-note,  which, 
under  the  breath  of  Homer,  has  made  the  wrath  of  Achilles  im- 
mortal ;  and  1  do  not  doubt  that  there  was  something  in  Scott's 
face,  and  especially  in  the  expression  of  his  mouth,  to  suggest  this 
even  to  his  early  college  companions.  Unfortunately,  however, 
even  "  one  crowded  hour  of  glorious  life  "  may  sometimes  have  a 
"sensual"  inspiration,  and  in  these  days  of  youthful  adventure, 
too  many  such  hours  seem  to  have  owed  their  inspiration  to  the 
Scottish  peasant's  chief  bane,  the  Highland  whisky.  In  his  eager 
search  after  the  old  ballads  of  the  Border,  Scott  had  many  a  blithe 
adventure,  which  ended  only  too  often  in  a  carouse.  It  was  soon 
after  this  time  that  he  first  began  those  raids  into  Liddesdale,  of 
which  all  the  world  has  enjoyed  the  records  in  the  sketches — em- 
bodied subsequently  in  Guy  Manner'ing — of  Dandie  Dinmont,  his 
pony  Dumple,  and  the  various  Peppers  and  Mustards  from  whose 
breed  there  was  afterwards  introduced  into  Scott's  own  family, 
generations  of  terriers,  always  named,  as  Sir  Walter  expressed  it, 
after  "  the  cruet."  I  must  quote  the  now  classic  record  of  those 
youthful  escapades : — 

"  Eh  me,'*  said  Mr.  Shortreed,  his  companion  in  all  these  Liddesdale 
raids,  sic  an  endless  fund  of  humour  and  drollery  as  he  had  then  wi*  him. 
Never  ten  3'ards  but  we  were  either  laughing  or  roaring  and  singing. 
Wherever  we  stopped,  how  brawlie  he  suited  himsel*  to  everybody!  fie 
aye  did  as  as  the  lave  did ;  never  made  himsel*  the  great  man  or  took  ony 
airs  in  the  company.  I've  seen  him  in  a'  moods  in  these  jaunts,  grave  and 
gay,  daft  and  serious,  sober  and  drunk— -(this,  however,  even  in  our  wild- 
est rambles,  was  but  rare) — but  drunk  or  sober  he  was  aye  the  gentleman. 
He  looked  excessively  heavy  and  stupid  when  he  was  foUy  but  he  was  never 
out  o'  gude  humour." 

One  of  the  stories  of  that  time  will  illustrate  better  the  wilder 
days  of  Scott's  youth  than  any  comment: — 

"  On  reaching  one  evening,"  says  Mr.  Lockhart,  some  Charlieshope  or 
other  (I  forget  the  name)  among  those  wildernesses,  they  found  a  kindly 
reception  as  usual ;  but  to  their  agreeable  surprise,  after  some  days  of  hard 
living,  a  measured  and  orderly  hospitality  as  respected  liquor.  Soon  after 
supper,  at  which  a  bottle  of  elderberry  wine  alone  had  been  produced,  a 
young  student  of  divinity  who  happened  to  be  in  the  house  was  called  upon 
to  take  the  *  big  ha'  Bible,'  in  the  good  old  fashion  of  Burns*  Saturday 
Night:  and  some  progress  had  been  already  made  in  the  service,  when  the 
good  man  of  the  farm,  whose  *  tendency,'  as  Mr.  Mitchell  says,  *  was 
soporific,'  scandalized  his  wife  and  the  dominie  by  starting  suddenly  from 

his  knees,  and  rubbing  his  eyes,  with  a  stentorian  exclamation  of  *  By  ! 

here's  the  keg  at  last  !  '  and  in  tumbled,  as  he  spake  the  word,  a  couple  of 
sturdy  herdsmen,  whom,  on  hearing,  a  day  before,  of  the  advocate's  ap- 
proaching visit,  he  had  despatched  to  a  certain  smuggler's  haunt  at  some 
considerable  distance  in  quest  of  a  supply  of  ri4n  brandy  from  the  Solwav 
frith.  The  pious  'exercise*  of  the  household  was  hopelessly  interrupted. 
With  a  thousand  apologies  for  his  hitherto  shabby  entertainment,  this 
jolly  Elliot  or  Armstrong  had  the  welcome  keg  mounted  on  the  table  with* 


SJI^  WALTER  SCOTT 


23 


out  a  moment's  delay,  and  gentle  and  simple,  not  forgetting  the  dominie, 
continued  carousing  about  it  until  daylight  streamed  in  upon  the  party. 
Sir  Walter  Scott  seldom  failed,  when  1  saw  him  in  company  with  h'is 
Liddesdale  companions,  to  mimic  with  infinite  humour  the  sudden  out- 
burst of  his  old  host  on  hearing  the  clatter  of  horses*  feet,  which  he  knew 
to  indicate  the  arrival  of  the  keg,  the  consternation  of  the  dame,  and  the 
rueful  despair  with  which  the  young  clergyman  closed  the  book."  * 

No  wonder  old  Mr.  Scott  felt  some  doubt  of  his  son's  success 
at  the  bar,  and  thought  him  more  fitted  in  many  respects  for  a 
*'gangrel  scrape-gut."  f 

In  spite  of  all  this  love  of  excitement,  Scott  became  a  sound 
lawyer,  and  might  have  been  a  great  lawyer,  had  not  his  pride  of 
character,  the  impatience  of  his  genius,  and  the  stir  of  his  imagina- 
tion rendered  him  indisposed  to  wait  and  slave  in  the  precise  man- 
ner which  the  prepossessions  of  solicitors  appoint. 

For  Scott's  passion  for  romantic  literature  was  not  at  all  the 
sort  of  thing  which  we  ordinarily  mean  by  boys'  or  girls'  love  of 
romance.  No  amount  of  drudgery  or  labour  deterred  Scott  from 
any  undertaking  on  the  prosecution  of  which  he  was  bent.  He  was 
quite  the  reverse,  indeed,  of  what  is  usually  meant  by  sentimental, 
either  in  his  manners  or  his  literary  interests.  As  regards  the 
history  of  his  own  country  he  was  no  mean  antiquarian.  Indeed 
he  cared  for  the  mustiest  antiquarian  researches — of  the  mediaeval 
kind — so  much,  that  in  the  depth  of  his  troubles  he  speaks  of  a  talk 
with  a  Scotch  antiquary  and  herald  as  one  of  the  things  which 
soothed  him  most.  "  I  do  not  know  anything  which  relieves  the 
rnind  so  much  from  the  sullens  as  trifling  discussions  about  anti- 
quarian old  womanries.  It  is  like  knitting  a  stocking,  diverting 
the  mind  without  occupying  it."  {  Thus  his  love  of  romantic 
literature  was  as  far  as  possible  from  that  of  a  mind  which  only 
feeds  on  romantic  excitements ;  rather  was  it  that  of  one  who  was 
so  moulded  by  the  transmitted  and  acquired  love  of  feudal  institu- 
tions with  all  their  incidents,  that  he  could  not  take  any  deep  inter- 
est in  any  other  fashion  of  human  society.  Now  the  Scotch  law 
was  full  of  vestings  and  records  of  that  period, — was  indeed  a  great 
standing  monument  of  it :  and  in  numbers  of  his  writings  Scott 
shows  with  how  deep  an  interest  he  had  studied  the  Scotch  law 
from  this  point  of  view.  He  remarks  somewdiere  that  it  w^as 
natural  for  a  Scotchman  to  feel  a  strong  attachment  to  the  princi- 
ple of  rank,  if  only  on  the  ground  that  almost  any  Scotchman 
might  under  the  Scotch  law,  turn  out  to  be  heir-in-tail  to  some 
great  Scotch  title  or  estate  by  the  death  of  intervening  relations. 
And  the  law  which  sometimes  caused  such  sudden  transformations, 
had  subsequently  a  true  interest  for  him  of  course  as  a  novel 
writer,  to  say  nothing  of  his  interest  in  it  as  an  antiquarian  and 
historian  who  loved  to  repeople  the  earth,  not  merely  with  the 
picturesQue  groups  of  the  soldiers  and  courts  of  the  past,  but  with 

*  Lockhart's  Life  of  Scott^  i.  269-71. 
t  Lockhart's  Life  of  Scott  ^  i.  206. 
X  Lockhart's  Life  cf  c^cott^  ix.  221. 


5.4 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


the  actors  in  all  the  various  quaint  and  homely  transactions  and 
puzzlements  which  the  feudal  ages  had  brought  forth.  Hence 
though,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  Scott  never  made  much  figure  as  an 
advocate,  he  became  a  very  respectable,  and  might  unquestionably 
have  become  a  very  great,  lawyer.  When  he  started  at  the  bar, 
however,  he  had  not  acquired  the  tact  to  impress  an  ordinary 
assembly.  In  one  case  which  he  conducted  before  the  General 
Assembly  of  the  Kirk  of  Scotland,  when  defending  a  parish  minis- 
ter threatened  with  deposition  for  drunkenness  and  unseemly  be- 
haviour, he  certainly  missed  the  proper  tone, — first  receiving  a 
censure  for  the  freedom  of  his  manner  in  treating  the  allegations 
against  his  client,  and  then  so  far  collapsing  under  the  rebuke  of 
the  Moderator,  as  to  lose  the  force  and  urgency  necessary  to  pro- 
duce an  effect  on  his  audience.  But  these  were  merely  a  boy's 
mishaps.  He  was  certainly  by  no  means  a  Heaven-born  orator, 
and  therefore  could  not  expect  to  spring  into  exceptionally  early 
distinction,  and  the  only  true  reason  for  his  relative  failure  was 
that  he  was  so  full  of  literary  power,  and  so  proudly  impatient  of 
the  fetters  which  prudence  seemed  to  impose  on  his  extra-profes- 
sional proceedings,  that  he  never  gained  the  credit  he  deserved  for 
the  general  common  sense,  the  unwearied  industry,  and  the  keen 
appreciation  of  the  ins  and  outs  of  legal  method,  which  might  have 
raised  him  to  the  highest  reputation  even  as  a  judge. 

All  readers  of  his  novels  know  how  Scott  delights  in  the 
humours  of  the  law.  By  way  of  illustration  take  the  following  pas- 
sage, which  is  both  short  and  amusing,  in  which  Saunders  Fair- 
ford— the  old  solicitor  painted  from  Scott's  father  in  Redgaunflet 
— descants  on  the  law  of  the  stirrup-cup.  "  It  was  decided  in  a 
case  before  the  town  bailies  of  Cupar  Angus,  when  Luckie  Simp- 
son's cow  had  drunk  up  Luckie  Jamieson's  browst  of  ale,  while  it 
stood  in  the  door  to  cool,  that  there  was  no  damage  to  pay,  because 
tlie  crummie  drank  without  sitting  down ;  such  being  the  circum- 
stance constituting  a  Doch  and  Dorroch,  which  is  a  standing  drink 
for  which  no  reckoning  is  paid."  1  do  not  believe  that  any  one  of 
Scott's  contemporaries  had  greater  legal  abilities  than  he,  though, 
as  it  happened,  they  were  never  fairly  tried.  But  he  had  both  the 
pride  and  impatience  of  genius.  It  fettered  him  to  feel  that  he 
was  dependent  on  the  good  opinions  of  solicitors,  and  that  they 
who  were  incapable  of  understanding  his  genius,  thought  the  less 
instead  of  the  better  of  him  as  an  advocate,  for  every  indication 
which  he  gave  of  that  genius.  Even  on  the  day  of  his  call  to  the 
bar  he  gave  expression  to  a  sort  of  humorous  foretaste  of  this 
impatience,  saying  to  William  Clerk,  who  had  been  called  with 
him,  as  he  mimicked  the  air  and  tone  of  a  Highland  lass  waiting 
at  the  Cross  of  Edinburgh  to  be  liired  for  the  harvest,  We've 
stood  here  an  hour  by  the  Tron,  hinny,  and  deil  a  ane  has  speered 
our  price.'*  Scott  continued  to  practice  at  the  bar — nominally  at 
least — for  fourteen  years,  but  the  most  which  he  ever  seems  to  have 
made  in  any  one  year  was  short  of  230/.,  and  latterly  his  practice 
was  much  diminishing  instead  of  increasing.    His  own  impatience 


S/A'  IVALTEK  SCOTT. 


of  solicitors'  patronage  was  against  him  ;  his  well-known  dahblings 
in  poetry  were  still  more  against  him  :  and  his  general  repute  for 
v/ild  and  unprofessional  adventurousness — which  was  much  greater 
than  he  deserved — was  probably  most  of  all  against  him.  Before 
he  had  been  six  years  at  the  bar  he  joined  the  organization  of  the 
Edinburgh  Volunteer  Cavalry,  took  a  very  active  part  in  the  drill, 
and  was  made  their  ()uartermaster.  Then  he  visited  London,  and 
became  largely  known  for  his  ballads,  and  his  love  of  ballads.  In 
his  eighth  year  at  the  bar  he  accepted  a  small  permanent  appoint- 
ment, with  300/.  year,  as  sheriff  of  Selkirkshire  ;  and  this  occur- 
ring soon  after  his  marriage  to  a  lady  of  some  means,  no  doubt 
diminished  still  further  his  professional  zeal.  For  one  third  of  the 
time  during  which  Scott  practised  as  an  advocate  he  made  no  pre- 
tence of  taking  interest  in  that  part  of  his  work,  though  he  was 
always  deeply  interested  in  the  law  itself.  In  1806  he  undertook 
gratuitously  the  duties  of  a  Clerk  of  Session— a  permanent  ofificer 
of  the  Court  at  Edinburgh — and  discharged  them  without  remuner- 
ation for  five  years,  from  1806  to  181 1,  in  order  to  secure  his  ulti- 
mate succession  to  the  office  in  the  place  of  an  invalid,  who  for 
that  period  received  all  the  emoluments  and  did  none  of  the  work. 
Nevertheless  Scott's  legal  abilities  were  so  well  known,  that  it 
was  certainly  at  one  time  intended  to  offer  him  a  Barony  of  the 
Exchequer,  and  it  was  his  own  doing,  apparently,  that  it  was  not 
offered.  The  life  of  literature  and  the  life  of  the  Bar  hardly  ever 
suit,  and  in  Scott's  case  they  suited  the  less,  that  he  felt  himself 
likely  to  be  a  dictator  in  the  one  field,  and  only  a  postulant  in  tlie 
other.  Literature  was  a  far  greater  gainer  by  his  choice,  than 
Law  could  have  been  a  loser.  For  his  capacity  for  the  law  he 
shared  with  thousands  of  able  men,  his  capacity  for  literature  with 
few  or  none. 


26 


SIR  WALTER  SuOTT, 


CHAPTER  III, 

LOVE  AND  MARRIAGE. 

One  Sunday,  about  two  years  before  his  call  to  the  bar,  Scott 
offered  his  umbrella  to  a  young  lady  of  much  beauty  who  was 
coming  out  of  the  Greyfriars  Church  during  a  shower ;  the  um- 
brella was  graciously  accepted  ;  and  it  was  not  an  unprecedented  con- 
sequence that  Scott  fell  in  love  with  the  borrower,  who  turned  out 
to  be  Margaret,  daughter  of  Sir  John  and  Lady  Jane  Stuart  Belches, 
of  Invernay.  For  near  six  years  after  this,  Scott  indulged  the 
hope  of  marrying  this  lady,  and  it  does  not  seem  doubtful  that  the 
lady  herself  was  in  part  responsible  for  this  impression.  Scott's 
father,  who  thought  his  son's  prospects  very  inferior  to  those  of 
Miss  Stuart  Belches,  felt  it  his  duty  to  warn  the  baronet  of  his 
son's  views,  a  warning  which  the  old  gentleman  appears  to  have 
received  with  that  grand  unconcern  characteristic  of  elderly  per- 
sons in  high  position,  as  a  hint  intrinsically  incredible,  or  least  un- 
worthy of  notice.  But  he  took  no  alarm,  and  Scott's  attentions  to 
Margaret  Stuart  Belches  continued  till  close  on  the  eve  of  her 
marriage,  in  1796,  to  William  Forbes  (afterwards  Sir  William 
Forbes),  of  Pitsligo,  a  banker,  who  proved  to  be  one  of  Sir  Walter's 
most  generous  and  most  delicate-minded  friends,  when  his  time  of 
troubles  came  towards  the  end  of  both  their  lives.  Whether  Scott 
was  in  part  mistaken  as  to  the  impression  he  had  made  on  the 
young  lady,  or  she  was  mistaken  as  to  the  impression  he  had  made 
on  herself,  or  whether  other  circumstances  intervened  to  cause 
misunderstanding,  or  the  grand  indifference  of  Sir  John  gave  way 
to  active  intervention  when  the  question  became  a  practical  one, 
the  world  will  now  never  know,  but  it  does  not  seem  very  likely 
that  a  man  of  so  much  force  as  wScott,  who  certainly  had  at  one 
time  assured  himself  at  least  of  the  young  lady's  strong  regard, 
should  have  been  easily  displaced  even  by  a  rival  of  ability  and  of 
most  generous  and  amiable  character.  An  entry  in  the  diary 
which  Scott  kept  in  1827,  after  Constable's  and  Ballantyne's  failure, 
and  his  wife's  death,  seems  to  me  to  suggest  that  there  may  have 
been  some  misunderstanding  between  the  young  people,  though  I 
am  not  sure  that  the  inference  is  justified.  The  passage  completes 
tlic  story  of  this  i)assion — Scott's  first  and  only  deep  passion — so 
lar  as  it  can  ever  be  known  to  us  ;  and  as  it  is  a  very  pathetic  and 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


27 


characteristic  entry,  and  the  attachment  to  which  it  refers  liad  a 
great  influence  on  Scott's  h'fe,  both  in  keeping  him  free  from  some 
of  the  most  dangerous  temptations  of  the  young,  during  his  youth, 
and  in  creating  within  him  an  interior  world  of  dreams  and  recol- 
lections throughout  his  whole  life,  on  which  his  imaginative  nature 
was  continually  fed — I  may  as  well  give  it.  He  had  taken,"  says 
Mr.  Lockhart,  "  for  that  winter  [1827],  the  house  No.  6,  Shandwick 
Place,  which  he  occupied  by  the  month  during  the  remainder  of 
his  servitude  as  a  clerk  of  session.  Very  near  this  house,  he  was 
told  a  few  days  after  he  took  possession,  dwelt  the  aged  mother  of 
his  first  love  ;  and  he  expressed  to  his  friend  Mrs.  Skene,  a  wish 
that  she  should  carry  him  to  renew  an  acquaintance  which  seems 
to  have  been  interrupted  from  the  period  of  his  youthful  romance. 
Mrs.  Skene  complied  with  his  desire,  and  she  tells  me  that  a  very 
painful  scene  ensued."  His  diary  says, — November  7th.  Began 
to  setde  myself  this  morning  after  the  hurry  of  mind  and  even  of 
body  which  I  have  lately  undergone.  I  went  to  make  a  visit  and 
fairly  softened  myself,  like  an  old  fool,  with  recalling  old  stories 
till  I  was  fit  for  nothing  but  shedding  tears  and  repeating  verses 
for  the  whole  night.  This  is  sad  work.  The  very  grave  gives  up 
its  dead,  and  time  rolls  back  thirty  years  to  add  to  my  perplexities. 
I  don't  care.  I  begin  to  grow  case-hardened,  and  like  a  stag  turn- 
ing at  bay,  my  naturally  good  temper  grows  fierce  and  dangerous. 
Yet  what  a  romance  to  tell — and  told  I  fear  it  will  one  day  be. 
And  then  my  three  years  of  dreaming  and  my  two  years  of  waken- 
ing will  be  chronicled,  doubtless.  But  the  dead  will  feel  no  pain. 
— November  loth.  At  twelve  o'clock  I  went  again  to  poor  Lady 
Jane  to  talk  over  old  stories.  I  am  not  clear  that  it  is  a  right  or 
healthful  indulgence  to  be  ripping  up  old  sores,  but  it  seems  to  give 
her  deep-rooted  sorrow  words,  and  that  is  a  mental  blood-letting. 
To  me  these  things  are  now  matter  of  calm  and  solemn  recollec- 
tion, never  to  be  forgotten,  yet  scarce  to  be  remembered  with 
pain."*  It  was  in  1797,  after  the  break-up  of  his  hopes  in  relation 
to  this  attachment,  that  Scott  wrote  the  lines  To  a  Violet,  which 
Mr.  F.  T.  Palgrave,  in  his  thoughtful  and  striking  introduction  to 
Scott's  poems,  rightly  characterises  as  one  of  the  most  beautiful 
of  those  poems.  It  is,  however,  far  from  one  characteristic  of 
Scott,  indeed,  so  different  in  style  from  the  best  of  his  other  poems 
that  Mr.  Browning  might  well  have  said  of  Scott,  as  he  once 
affirmed  of  himself,  that  for  the  purpose  of  one  particular  poem,  he 
"who  blows  through  bronze,"  had  "breathed  through  silver," — had 
"curbed  the  liberal  hand  subservient  proudly," — and  tamed  his 
spirit  to  a  key  elsewhere  unknown. 

The  violet  in  her  greenwood  bower, 

Where  birchen  boughs  widi  hazels  mingle, 

May  boast  itself  the  fairest  flower 
In  glen,  or  copse,  or  forest  dingle. 


Lockharfs  Life  cf  Scott,  ix,  183-4. 


28 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


Though  fair  her  gems  of  azure  hue, 

Beneath  the  dewdrop's  weight  reclining, 

I've  seen  an  eye  of  lovelier  blue, 

More  sweet  through  watery  lustre  shining. 

The  summer  sun  that  dew  shall  dry. 

Ere  yet  the  day  be  past  its  morrow  ; 
Nor  longer  in  my  false  love's  eye 

Remain'd  the  tear  of  parting  sorrow." 

These  lines  obviously  betray  a  feeling  of  resentment,  which 
may  or  may  not  have  been  justified  ;  but  they  are  perhaps  the 
most  delicate  produced  by  his  pen.  The  pride  which  was  always 
so  notable  a  feature  in  Scott,  probably  sustained  him  through  the 
keen,  inward  pain  which  it  is  very  certain  from  a  great  many  of  his 
own  words  that  he  must  have  suffered  in  this  uprooting  of  his 
most  passionate  hopes.  And  it  was  in  part  probably  the  same 
pride  which  led  him  to  form,  within  the  year,  a  new^  tie — his  engage- 
ment to  Mademoiselle  Charpentier,  or  Miss  Carpenter  as  she  was 
usually  called,  the  daughter  of  a  French  royalist  of  Lyons  who  had 
died  early  in  the  revolution.  She  had  come  after  her  father's  death 
to  England,  chiefly,  it  seems,  because  in  the  Marquis  of  Down- 
shire,  who  was  an  old  friend  of  the  family,  her  mother  knew  that 
she  should  find  a  protector  for  her  children.  Miss  Carpenter  was 
a  lively  beauty,  probably  of  no  great  depth  of  character.  The  fev/ 
letters  given  of  hers  in  Mr.  Lockhart's  life  of  Scott,  give  the  im.- 
pression  of  amiable,  petted  girl,  of  somewhat  thin  and  espiegle  char- 
acter, who  was  rather  charmed  at  the  depth  and  intensity  of  Scott's 
nature,  and  at  the  expectations  which  he  seemed  to  form  of  what 
love  should  mean,  than  capable  of  realising  them.  Evidently  she 
had  no  inconsiderable  pleasure  in  display;  but  she  made  on  the 
whole  a  very  good  wife,  only  one  to  be  protected  by  him  from 
every  care,  and  not  one  to  share  Scott's  deeper  anxieties,  or  to 
participate  in  his  dreams.  Yet  Mrs.  Scott  was  not  devoid  of  spirit 
and  self-control.  For  instance,  when  Mr.  Jeffrey,  having  reviewed 
Marmioii  in  the  Edinburgh  in  that  depreciating  and  omniscient  tone 
which  was  then  considered  the  evidence  of  critical  acumen,  dined 
with  Scott  on  the  very  day  on  which  the  review^  had  appeared,  Mrs. 
Scott  behaved  to  him  through  the  whole  evening  with  the  greatest 
politeness,  but  fired  his  parting  shot  in  her  broken  English,  as  he 
took  his  leave, — "  Well,  good  night,  Mr.  Jeffrey, — dey  tell  me  you 
have  abused  Scott  in  de  Review^  and  I  hope  Mr.  Constable  has 
paid  you  very  well  for  writing  it.''  It  is  hinted  that  Mrs.  Scott 
was,  at  the  time  of  Scott's  greatest  fame,  far  more  exhilarated  by 
it  than  her  husband  with  his  strong  sense  and  sure  self-measure- 
ment ever  was.  Mr.  Lockhart  records  that  Mrs.  Grant  of  Laggan 
once  said  of  them,  Mr.  Scott  always  seems  to  me  like  a  glass, 
through  which  the  rays  of  admiration  pass  without  sensibly  affect- 
ing it ;  but  the  bit  of  paper  that  lies  beside  it  will  presently  be  in  a 
blaze,  and  no  wonder,"  The  bit  of  paper,  however,  never  was  in  a 
blaze  that  1  know  of ;  and  possibly  Mrs.  Grant's  remark  may  have 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT, 


29 


had  a  little  feminine  spite  in  it.  At  all  events,  it  was  not  till  the 
rays  of  misfortune,  instead  of  admiration,  fell  upon  Scott's  life,  that 
the  delicate  tissue  paper  shrivelled  up  ;  nor  does  it  seem  that,  even 
then,  it  was  the  trouble,  so  much  as  a  serious  malady  that  had  fixed 
on  Lady  Scott  before  Sir  Walter's  troubles  began,  which  really 
scorched  up  her  life.  That  she  did  not  feel  with  the  depth  and  in- 
tensity of  her  husband,  or  in  the  same  key  of  feeling,  is  clear. 
ter  the  failure,  and  during  the  preparations  for  abandoning  the 
house  in  Edinburgh,  Scott  records  in  his  diary: — "It  is  with  a 
sense  of  pain  that  I  leave  behind  a  parcel  of  trumpery  prints  and 
little  ornaments,  once  the  pride  of  Lady  Scott's  heart,  but  which  she 
saw  consigned  with  indifference  to  the  chance  of  an  auction. 
Things  that  have  had  their  day  of  importance  with  me,  I  cannot 
forget,  though  the  merest  trifles  ;  but  I  am  glad  that  she,  with  bad 
health,  and  enough  to  vex  her,  has  not  the  same  useless  mode  of 
associating  recollections  with  this  unpleasant  business."  * 

Poor  Lady  Scott !  It  was  rather  like  a  bird  of  paradise  mating 
with  an  eagle.  Yet  the  result  was  happy  on  the  whole  ;  for  she 
had  a  thoroughly  kindly  nature,  and  a  true  heart.  Within  ten  days 
before  her  death,  Scott  enters  in  his  diary  : — "  Still  welcoming  me 
v^ith  a  smile,  and  asserting  she  is  better."  She  was  not  the  ideal 
wife  for  Scott ;  but  she  loved  him,  sunned  herself  in  his  prosperity, 
and  tried  to  bear  his  adversity  cheerfully.  In  her  last  illness  she 
would  always  reproach  her  husband  and  children  for  their  melan- 
choly faces,  even  when  that  melancholy  was,  as  well  she  knew,  due 
to  the  approaching  ^shadow  of  her  own  death. 


*  Lockhart's  Life  of  Scott^  viii.  273. 


30 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


CHAPTER  IV. 

EARLIER  POETRY  AND  BORDER  MINSTRELSY. 

Scott's  first  serious  attempt  in  poetry  was  a  version  of  Burger's 
Lenore,  a  spectre-ballad  of  the  violent  kind,  much  in  favour  in  Ger- 
many at  a  somewhat  earlier  period,  but  certainly  not  a  specimen  of 
the  higher  order  of  imaginative  genius.  However,  it  stirred  Scott's 
youthful  blood,  and  made  him  "wish  to  heaven  he  could  get  a  skull 
and  two  cross-bones  !  "  a  modest  desire,  to  be  expressed  with  so 
much  fervour,  and  one  almost  immediately  gratified.  Probably  no 
one  ever  gave  a  more  spirited  version  of  Biirger's  ballad  than  Scott 
has  given  ;  but  the  use  to  which  Miss  Cranstoun,  a  friend  and  con- 
fidante of  his  love  for  Miss  Stuart  Belches,  strove  to  turn  it,  by  get- 
ting it  printed,  blazoned,  and  richly  bound,  and  presenting  it  to  the 
young  lady  as  a  proof  of  her  admirer's  abilities,  was  perhaps  hardly 
very  sagacious.  It  is  quite  possible,  at  least,  that  Miss  Stuart 
Belches  may  have  regarded  this  vehement  admirer  of  spectral  wed- 
ding journeys  and  skeleton  bridals,  as  unhkely  to  prepare  for  her 
that  comfortable,  trim,  and  decorous  future  which  young  ladies 
usually  desire.  At  any  rate,  the  bold  stroke  failed.  The  young 
lady  admired  the  verses,  but,  as  we  have  seen,  declined  the  trans- 
lator. Perhaps  she  regarded  banking  as  safer,  if  less  brilliant, 
work  than  the  most  effective  description  of  skeleton  riders.  In- 
deed, Scott  at  this  time — to  those  who  did  not  know  what  was  in 
him,  which  no  one,  not  even  excepting  himself,  did — had  no  very 
sure  prospects  of  comfort,  to  say  nothing  of  wealth.  It  is  curious, 
too,  that  his  first  adventure  in  literature  was  thus  connected  with 
his  interest  in  the  preternatural,  for  no  man  ever  lived  whose  ge- 
nius was  sounder  and  healthier,  and  less  disposed  to  dwell  on  the 
half-and-half  lights  of  a  dim  and  eerie  world  ;  yet  ghostly  subjects 
always  interested  him  deeply,  and  he  often  touched  them  in  his 
stories,  more,  I  think,  from  the  strong  artistic  contrast  they 
afforded  to  his  favourite  conceptions  of  life,  than  from  any  other 
motive.  There  never  was,  I  fancy,  an  organisation  less  susceptible 
of  this  order  of  fears  and  superstitions  than  his  own.  When  a 
friend  jokingly  urged  him,  within  a  few  months  of  his  death,  not  to 
leave  Rome  on  a  Friday,  as  it  was  a  day  of  bad  omen  for  a  jour- 
ney, he  replied,  laughing,  "Superstition  is  very  picturesque,  and  I 
make  it,  at  times,  stand  me  in  great  stead,  but  I  never  allow  it  to 
interfere  with  interest  or  convenience."    Basil  Hall  reports  Scott's 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


31 


having  told  him  on  the  last  evening  of  the  year  1824,  when  they 
were  talking  over  tin's  subject,  that  "  having  once  arrived  at  a  coun- 
try inn,  he  was  told  there  was  no  bed  for  him.  '  No  place  to  lie 
down  at  all  ?  '  said  he.  '  No,'  said  the  people  of  the  house  ;  'none, 
except  a  room  in  which  there  is  a  corpse  lying.'  '  Well,' said  he, 
*did  the  person  die  of  any  contagious  disorder  ? '  *  Oh,  no  ;  not  at 
all,'  said  they.  '  Well,  then,'  continued  he,  '  let  me  have  the  other 
bed.  So,'  said  Sir  Walter,  '  I  laid  me  down,  and  never  had  a  better 
night's  sleep  in  my  life.'  "  He  was,  indeed,  a  man  of  iron  nerve, 
whose  truest  artistic  enjoyment  was  in  noting  the  forms  of  charac- 
ter seen  in  full  daylight  by  the  light  of  the  most  ordinary  experi- 
ence. Perhaps  for  that  reason  he  can  on  occasion  relate  a  preter- 
natural incident,  such  as  the  appearance  of  old  Alice  at  the  foun- 
tain, at  the  very  moment  of  her  death,  to  the  Master  of  Ravens- 
wood,  in  The  Bride  of  Lam77te}7Hoor,  great  effect.  It  was 
probably  the  vivacity  with  which  he  realised  the  violence  which 
such  incidents  do  to  the  terrestrial  common  sense  of  our  ordinary 
nature,  and  at  the  same  time  the  sedulous  accuracy  of  detail  with 
which  he  narrated  them,  rather  than  any,  even  the  smallest,  special 
susceptibihty  of  his  own  brain  to  thrills  of  the  preternatural  kind, 
which  gave  him  rather  a  unique  pleasure  in  dealing  with  such  pre- 
ternatural elements.  Sometimes,  however,  his  ghosts  are  a  little 
too  muscular  to  produce  their  due  effect  as  ghosts.  In  translating 
Burger's  ballad  his  great  success  lay  in  the  vividness  of  the  spectre's 
horsemanship.    For  instance, — 

Tramp  !  tramp !  along  the  land  they  rode, 

Splash  !  splash  !  along  the  sea  ; 
The  scourge  is  red,  the  spur  drops  blood, 

The  flashing  pebbles  flee/' 

is  far  better  than  any  ghostly  touch  in  it ;  so,  too,  every  one  will 
remember  how  spirited  a  rider  is  the  white  Lady  of  Avenel,  in 
The  Monastery,  and  how  vigorously  she  takes  fords, — as  vigor- 
ously as  the  sheriff  himself,  who  was  very  fond  of  fords.  On  the 
whole,  Scott  was  too  sunny  and  healthy-minded  for  a  ghost-seer  *, 
and  the  skull  and  cross-bones  with  which  he  ornamented  his 
"  den  "  in  his  father's  house,  did  not  succeed  in  tempting  him  into 
the  world  of  twilight  and  cobwebs  wherein  he  made  his  first  liter- 
ary excursion.  His  William  and Hele7i,  the  name  he  gave  to  his 
translation  of  Burger's  Lenore,  made  in  1795,  was  effective,  after 
all,  more  for  its  rapid  movement,  than  for  the  weirdness  of  its 
effects. 

If,  however,  it  was  the  raw  preternaturalism  of  such  ballads  as 
Burger's  w^hich  first  led  Scott  to  test  his  own  powers,  his  genius 
soon  turned  to  more  appropriate  and  natural  subjects.  Ever  since 
his  earliest  college  days  he  had  been  collecting,  in  those  excursions 
of  his  into  Liddesdale  and  elsewhere,  materials  for  a  book  on  The 
Minstrelsy  of  the  Scottish  Border;  and  the  publication  of  this 
work,  in  January,  1802  (in  two  volumes  at  first),  was  his  first  great 


32 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


literary  success.  The  whole  edition  of  eight  hundred  copies  was 
sold  within  the  year,  while  the  skill  and  care  which  Scott  had  de- 
voted to  the  historical  illustration  of  the  ballads,  and  the  force  and 
spirit  of  his  own  new  ballads,  written  in  imitation  of  the  old,  gained 
him  at  once  a  very  high  literary  name.  And  the  name  was  well  de^ 
served.  The  Border  Minstrelsy  was  more  commensurate  in  rang^ 
with  the  genius  of  Scott,  than  even  the  romantic  poems  by  whic>^ 
it  was  soon  followed,  and  which  were  received  with  such  uni versa/ 
and  almost  unparalleled  delight.  For  Scott's  Border  Minstrels) 
gives  more  than  a  glimpse  of  all  his  many  great  powers — his  his- 
torical industry  and  knowledge,  his  masculine  humor,  his  delight 
in  restoring  the  vision  of  the  '*  old,  simple,  violent  world  "  of  rugged 
activity  and  excitement,  as  w^ell  as  that  power  to  kindle  men's 
hearts,  as  by  a  trumpet-call,  which  was  the  chief  secret  of  the  charm 
of  his  own  greatest  poems.  It  is  much  easier  to  discern  the  great 
novelist  of  subsequent  years  in  Border  M in si7'elsy  even  in 
The  Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel^  Marniion^  and  The  Lady  of  the  I^ake 
taken  together.  From  those  romantic  poems  you  would  never 
guess  that  Scott  entered  more  eagerly  and  heartily  into  the  com- 
mon incidents  and  common  cares  of  every-day  human  life  than 
into  the  most  romantic  fortunes  ;  from  them  you  would  never  know 
how  completely  he  had  mastered  the  leading  features  of  quite  dif- 
ferent periods  of  our  history;  from  them  you  would  never  infer 
that  you  had  before  you  one  of  the  best  plodders,  as  well  as  one 
of  the  most  enthusiastic  dreamers,  in  British  literature.  But  all 
this  might  have  been  gathered  from  the  various  introductions  and 
notes  to  the  Bo7^der  Minstrelsy,  which  are  full  of  skilful  illus- 
trations, of  comments  teeming  with  humour,  and  of  historic 
weight.  The  general  introduction  gives  us  a  general  survey  of  the 
graphic  pictures  of  Border  quarrels,  their  simple  violence  and  sim- 
ple cunning.  It  enters,  for  instance,  with  grave  humour  into  the 
strong  distinction  taken  in  the  debatable  land  between  a  "  free- 
booter "  and  a  "thief,"  and  the  difficulty  which  the  inland  counties 
had  in  grasping  it,  and  paints  for  us,  with  great  vivacity,  the  va- 
rious Border  superstitions.  Another  commentary  on  a  very  amu- 
sing ballad,  commemorating  the  manner  in  which  a  blind  harper 
stole  a  horse  and  got  paid  for  a  mare  he  had  not  lost,  gives  an  ac- 
count of  the  curious  tenure  of  land,  called  that  of  the  "king's  rent- 
allers,"  or  "kindly  tenants  ;  "  and  a  third  describes,  in  language 
as  vivid  as  the  historical  romance  of  Kenilworth,  written  years 
after,  the  manner  in  which  Queen  Elizabeth  received  the  news  of 
a  check  to  her  policy,  and  vented  her  spleen  on  the  King  of  Scot- 
land. 

So  much  as  to  the  breadth  of  the  literary  area  which  this  first 
book  of  Scott's  covered.  As  regards  the  poetic  power  which  his 
own  new  ballads,  in  imitation  of  the  old  ones,  evinced,  I  cannot  say 
that  tliose  of  the  first  issue  of  the  Border  Minstrelsy  indicated  any- 
thing like  the  force  which  might  have  been  expected  from  one  who 
was  so  soon  to  be  the  author  of  Marjnion,  though  many  of  Scott';' 
warmest  admirers,  including  Sir  P>ancis  Doyle,  seem  to  plac» 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT, 


33 


Glenfinlas  among  his  finest  productions.  But  in  the  third  volume 
Border  Mmstrelsy,^\)\z\id:\(i  not  appear  till  1803,1s  con- 
tained a  ballad  on  the  assassination  of  the  Regent  Murray,  the 
story  being  told  by  his  assassin,  which  seems  to  me  a  specimen  of 
his  very  highest  poetical  powers.  In  Cadyow  Castle  you  have  not 
only  that  rousing  trumpet-note  which  you  hear  in  Mannion,  but 
the  pomp  and  ghtter  of  a  grand  martial  scene  is  painted  with  all 
Scott's  peculiar  terseness  and  vigour.  The  opening  is  singularly 
happy  in  preparing  the  reader  for  the  description  of  a  violent  deed. 
The  Earl  of  Arran,  chief  of  the  clan  of  Hamiltons,  is  chasing  among 
the  old  oaks  of  Cadyow  Castle, — oaks  which  belonged  to  the  an- 
cient Caledonian  forest,— the  fierce,  wild  bulls,  milk-white,  with 
black  muzzles,  which  were  not  extirpated  till  shortly  before  Scott's 
own  birth : — 

"  Through  the  huge  oaks  of  Evandale 

Whose  limbs  a  thousand  years  have  worn, 
What  sullen  roar  comes  down  the  gale, 
And  drowns  the  hunter's  pealing  hofn  ? 

*'  Mightiest  of  all  the  beasts  of  chase 
That  roam  in  woody  Caledon, 
Crashing  the  forest  in  his  race, 

The  mountain  bull  comes  thundering  on. 

"  Fierce  on  the  hunter^s  quiver'd  band 
He  rolls  his  eyes  of  swarthy  glow, 
Spurns,  with  black  hoof  and  horn,  the  sand, 
And  tosses  high  his  mane  of  snow^ 

Aim'd  well,  the  chieftain's  lance  has  flown  ; 

Struggling  in  blood  the  savage  lies ; 
His  roar  is  sunk  in  hollow  groan, — 

Sound,  merry  huntsman  !  sound  the  pryse  ! 

It  is  while  the  hunters  are  resting  after  this  feat,  that  Both- 
wellhaugh  dashes  among  them  headlong,  spurring  his  jaded  steed 
with  poniard  instead  of  spur  : — 

"  From  gory  selle  and  reeling  steed, 

Sprang  the  fierce  horseman  with  a  bound. 
And  reeking  from  the  recent  deed, 
He  dash'd  his  carbine  on  the  ground," 

And  then  Bothwellhaugh  tells  his  tale  of  blood,  describing  the  pro- 
cession from  which  he  had  singled  out  his  prey : — 

"  '  Dark  Morton,  girt  with  many  a  spear. 
Murder's  foul  minion,  led  the  van  ; 
And  clash'd  their  broadswords  in  the  rear 
The  wild  Macfarlanes'  plaided  clan. 

"  *  Glencairn  and  stout  Parkhead  were  nigh. 
Obsequious  at  their  Regent's  rein, 
And  haggard  Lindsay's  iron  eye. 
That  saw  fair  Mary  weep  in  vain. 

3 


34 


S/K  WALTER  SCOT^. 


*  Mid  pennon'd  spears,  a  steely  grove, 

Proud  Murray's  plumage  floated  high  ; 
Scarce  could  his  trampling  charger  move. 
So  close  the  minions  crowded  nigh. 

**  *  From  the  raised  visor's  shade,  his  eye, 
Dark  rolling,  glanced  the  ranks  along. 
And  his  steel  truncheon  waved  on  high, 
Seem'd  marshalling  the  iron  throng. 

*  But  yet  his  sadden'd  brow  confessed 

A  passing  shade  of  doubt  and  awe  ; 
Some  fiend  was  whispering  in  his  breast, 
Beware  of  injured  Bothwellhaugh !  " 

**  ^  The  death-shot  parts, — the  charger  springs, — 
Wild  rises  tumult's  startling  roar  ! 
And  Murray's  plumy  helmet  rings — 
Rings  on  the  ground  to  rise  no  more.'" 

This  was  the  ballad  which  made  so  strong  an  impression  on 
Thomas  Campbell,  the  poet.  Referring  to  some  of  the  lines  I  have 
quoted,  Campbell  said,—"  I  have  repeated  them  so  often  on  the  North 
Bridge  that  the  whole  fraternity  of  coachmen  know  me  by  tongue 
as  I  pass.  To  be  sure,  to  a  mind  in  sober,  serious,  street-walking 
humour,  it  must  bear  an  appearance  of  lunacy  when  one  stamps 
with  the  hurried  pace  and  fervent  shake  of  the  head  which  strong, 
pithy  poetry  excites."  *  I  suppose  anecdotes  of  this  kind  have 
been  oftener  told  of  Scott  than  of  any  other  English  poet.  Indeed, 
Sir  Walter,  who  understood  himself  well,  gives  the  explanation  in 
one  of  his  diaries  : — I  am  sensible,"  he  says,  that  if  there  be 
anything  good  about  my  poetry  or  prose  either,  it  is  a  hurried 
frankness  of  composition,  which  pleases  soldiers,  sailors,  and  young 
people  of  bold  and  active  dispositions."  f  He  might  have  included 
old  people  too.  I  have  heard  of  two  old  men — complete  strangers 
— passing  each  other  on  a  dark  London  night,  when  one  of  them 
happened  to  be  repeating  to  himself,  just  as  Camj^bell  did  to  the 
hackney  coachmen  of  the  North  Bridge  of  Edinburgh,  the  last 
lines  of  the  account  of  Flodden  Field  in  Marmion,  "  Charge, 
Chester,  charge,"  when  suddenly  a  reply  came  out  of  the  darkness, 
*'  On,  Stanley,  on,"  whereupon  they  finished  the  death  of  Marmion 
between  them,  took  off  their  hats  to  each  other,  and  parted,  laugh- 
ing. Scott's  is  almost  the  only  poetry  in  the  English  language  that 
not  only  runs  thus  in  the  head  of  average  men,  but  heats  the  head 
in  which  it  runs  by  the  mere  force  of  its  hurried  frankness  of  style, 
to  use  Scott's  own  terms,  or  by  that  of  its  strong  and  pithy 
eloquence,  as  Campbell  phrased  it.  And  in  Cadyow  Castle  this 
style  is  at  its  culminating  point. 


*  L,ockhart's  Life  of  Scott,  ii.  79. 


t  Lockliart's  Life  of  Scott,  viii.  370. 


S/R  WALTER  SCOTT, 


35 


CHAPTER  V. 

SCOTT'S  MATURER  POEMS. 

Scott's  genius  flowered  late.  Cadyow  Castle,  the  first  of  his 
poems,  I  think,  that  has  indisputable  genius  plainly  stamped  on  its 
terse  and  fiery  lines,  was  composed  in  1802,  when  he  was  already 
thirty-one  years  of  age.  It  was  in  the  same  year  that  he  wrote  the 
first  canto  of  his  first  great  romance  in  verse,  The  Lay  of  the  Last 
Mi7tsirel,  a  poem  which  did  not  appear  till  1805,  when  he  was 
tliirty-four.  The  first  canto  (not  including  the  framework,  of  which 
the  aged  harper  is  the  principal  figure)  was  written  in  the  lodgings 
to  which  he  was  confined  for  a  fortnight  in  1802,  by  a  kick  received 
from  a  horse  on  Portobello  sands,  during  a  charge  of  the  Volunteer 
Cavalry  in  which  Scott  was  cornet.  The  poem  was  originally  in- 
tended to  be  included  in  the  Border  Mmsirelsy^  as  one  of  the 
studies  in  the  antique  style,  but  soon  outgrew  the  limits  of  such  a 
study  both  in  length  and  in  the  freedom  of  its  manner.  Both  the 
poorest  and  the  best  parts  of  The  Lay  were  in  a  special  manner 
due  to  Lady  Dalkeith  (afterwards  Duchess  of  Buccleugh),  who 
suggested  it,  and  in  whose  honour  the  poem  was  written.  It  was 
she  who  requested  Scott  to  write  a  poem  on  the  legend  of  the 
goblin  page,  Gilpin  Horner,  and  this  Scott  attempted, — and,  so  far 
as  the  goblin  himself  was  concerned,  conspicuously  failed.  He 
himself  clearly  saw  that  the  story  of  this  unmanageable  imp  was 
botli  confused  and  uninteresting,  and  that  in  fact  he  had  to 
extricate  himself  from  the  original  groundwork  of  the  tale,  as  from 
a  regular  literary  scrape,  in  the  best  way  he  could.  In  a  letter  to 
Miss  Seward,  Scott  says, — "  At  length  the  story  appeared  so  un- 
couth that  I  was  fain  to  put  it  into  the  mouth  of  my  old  minstrel, 
lest  the  nature  of  it  should  be  misunderstood,  and  I  should  be 
suspected  of  setting  up  a  new  school  of  poetry,  instead  of  a  feeble 
attempt  to  imitate  the  old.  In  the  process  of  the  romance,  the 
page  intended  to  be  a  principal  person  in  the  work,  contrived  (from 
the  baseness  of  his  natural  propensities,  I  suppose)  to  slink  down 
stairs  into  the  kitchen,  and  now  he  must  e'en  abide  there."  *  And 
I  venture  to  say  that  no  reader  of  the  poem  ever  has  distinctly 
understood  what  the  goblin  page  did  or  did  not  do,  what  it  was 
that  was  "  lost "  throughout  the  poem  and    found  "  at  the  con- 

*  Lockhart's  Life  of  Scott,  ii.  217* 


36 


S/A'  WALTER  SCOTT, 


elusion,  what  was  the  object  of  his  personating  the  young  heir  of 
the  house  of  Scott,  and  whether  or  not  that  object  was  answered  ; 
— what  use,  if  any,  the  magic  book  of  Michael  Scott  was  to  the 
Lady  of  Branksome,  or  whether  it  was  only  harm  to  her;  and  I 
doubt  moreover  whether  any  one  ever  cared  an  iota  what  answer,  or 
whether  any  answer,  might  be  given  to  any  of  these  questions. 
All  this,  as  Scott  himself  clearly  perceived,  was  left  confused,  and 
not  simply  vague.  The  goblin  imp  had  been  more  certainly  an 
imp  of  mischief  to  him  than  even  to  his  boyish  ancestor.  But  if 
Lady  Dalkeith  suggested  the  poorest  part  of  the  poem,  she  cer- 
tainly inspired  its  best  part.  Scott  says,  as  we  have  seen,  that  he 
brought  in  the  aged  harper  to  save  himself  from  the  imputation  of 
"setting  up  a  new  school  of  poetry"  instead  of  humbly  imitating 
an  old  school.  But  I  think  that  the  chivalrous  wisn  to  do  honour 
to  Lady  Dalkeith,  both  as  a  personal  friend  and  as  the  wife  of  his 
"  chief," — as  he  always  called  the  head  of  the  house  of  Scott,— had 
more  to  do  with  the  i'^ntroduction  of  the  aged  harper,  than  the  wish 
to  guard  himself  against  the  imputation  of  attempting  a  new  poetic 
style.  He  clearly  intended  the  Duchess  of  The  Lay  to  represent 
the  Countess  for  whom  he  wrote  it,  and  the  aged  harper,  with  his 
reverence  and  gratitude  and  self-distrust,  was  only  the  disguise  in 
which  he  felt  that  he  could  best  pour  out  his  loyalty,  and  the 
romantic  devotion  with  which  both  Lord  and  Lady  Dalkeith,  but 
especially  the  latter,  had  inspired  him.  It  was  certainly  this  beauti- 
ful framework  v/hich  assured  the  immediate  success  and  permanent 
charm  of  the  poem :  and  the  immediate  success  was  for  that  day 
something  marvellous.  The  magnificent  quarto  edition  of  750 
copies  was  soon  exhausted,  and  an  octavo  edition  of  1 500  copies 
was  sold  out  within  the  year.  In  the  following  year  two  editions, 
containing  together  4250  copies,  were  disposed  of,  and  before 
twenty-five  years  had  elapsed,  that  is,  before  1830,  44,000  co]:)ies  of 
the  poem  had  been  bought  by  the  public  in  this  country,  taking 
account  of  the  legitimate  trade  alone.  Scott  gained  in  all  by  The 
Lay  769/.,  an  unprecedented  sum  in  those  times  for  an  author  to 
obtain  from  any  poem.  Little  more  than  half  a  century  before, 
Johnson  received  but  fifteen  guineas  for  his  stately  poem  on  The 
Vanity  of  Human  Wishes,  and  but  ten  guineas  for  his  London. 
I  do  not  say  that  Scott's  poem  had  not  much  more  in  it  of  true 
poetic  fire,  though  Scott  himself,  I  believe,  preferred  these  poems 
of  Johnson's  to  anything  that  he  himself  ever  wrote.  But  the  dis- 
proportion in  the  reward  was  certainly  enormous,  and  yet  what 
Scott  gained  by  his  Lay  was  of  course  much  less  than  he  gained  by 
any  of  his  subsequent  poems  of  equal  or  anything  like  equal,  length. 
Thus  for  Mar7nion  he  received  1000  guineas  long  before  the  poem 
was  published,  and  for  ojie  half  of  the  copyright  of  The  Lord  of 
the  Lsles  Constable  paid  wScott  1 500  guineas.  If  we  ask  ourselves 
to  what  this  vast  popularity  of  Scott's  poems,  and  especially  of  the 
earlier  of  them  (for,  as  often  happens,  he  was  better  remunerated 
for  his  later  and  much  inferior  poems  than  for  his  earlier  and  more 
brilliant  productions)  is  due,  I  think  the  answer  must  be  for  the 


S//i  WALTER  SCOTT. 


37 


most  Dart,  the  high  romantic  glow  and  extraordinaiy  romantic 
simplicTty  of  the  poetical  elements  they  contained.  Take  the  old 
harper  of  The  Lay^  a  figure  which  arrested  the  attention  of  Pitt 
during  even  that  last  most  anxious  year  of  his  anxious  life,  the  year 
of  Ulm  and  Austerlitz.  The  lines  in  which  Scott  describes  the 
old  man's  embarrassment  when  first  urged  to  play,  produced  on 
Pitt,  according  to  his  own  account,  "an  effect  which  I  might  have 
expected  in  painting,  but  could  never  have  fancied  capable  of  being 
given  in  poetry."  * 

Every  one  knows  the  lines  to  which  Pitt  refers 

"  The  humble  boon  was  soon  obtain'd  ; 
The  aged  minstrel  audience  gain'd. 
But,  when  he  reach'd  the  room  of  state, 
Where  she  with  all  her  ladies  sate, 
Perchance  he  wish'd  his  boon  denied  ; 
For,  when  to  tune  the  harp  he  tried, 
His  trembling  hand  had  lost  the  ease 
Which  marks  security  to  please  ; 
And  scenes  long  past,  of  joy  and  pain. 
Came  wildering  o'er  his  aged  brain, — 
He  tried  to  tune  his  harp  in  vain  ! 
The  pitying  Duchess  praised  its  chime, 
And  gave  him  heart,  and  gave  him  time, 
Till  every  string's  according  glee 
Was  blended  into  harmony. 
And  then,  he  said,  he  would  full  fain 
He  could  recall  an  ancient  strain 
He  never  thought  to  sing  again. 
It  was  not  framed  for  village  churls, 
But  for  high  dames  and  mighty  earls  ; 
He'd  play'd  it  to  King  Charles  the  Good, 
When  he  kept  Court  at  Holyrood  ; 
And  much  he  wish'd,  yet  fear'd,  to  try 
The  long-forgotten  melody. 
Amid  the  strings  his  fingers  stray'd, 
And  an  uncertain  warbling  made, 
And  oft  he  shook  his  hoary  head. 
But  when  he  caught  the  measure  wild 
The  old  man  raised  his  face  and  smiled 
And  lighten'd  up  his  faded  eye. 
With  all  a  poet's  ecstasy! 
In  varying  cadence,  soft  or  strong, 
He  swept  the  sounding  chords  along ; 
The  present  scene,  the  future  lot. 
His  toils,  his  wants,  were  all  forgot; 
Cold  diffidence  and  age's  frost 
In  the  full  tide  of  song  were  lost ; 
Each  blank  in  faithless  memory  void 
The  poet's  glowing  thought  supplied  ; 
And,  while  his  harp  responsive  rung, 
*Twas  thus  the  latest  minstrel  sung. 


Lockhart's  Life  of  Scott ^  ii.  226. 


38 


S//?  WALTER  SCOTT. 


%  %  ^  %  1ft 

Here  paused  the  harp  ;  and  with  its  swell 
1  he  master's  fire  and  courage  fell ; 
Dejectedly  and  low  he  bow'd, 
And,  gazing  timid  on  the  crowd, 
He  seem'd  to  seek  in  every  eye 
If  they  approved  his  minstrelsy  ; 
And,  diffident  of  present  praise, 
Somewhat  he  spoke  of  former  days, 
And  how  old  age,  and  wandering  long, 
Had  done  his  hand  and  harp  some  wrong." 

These  lines  hardly  illustrate,  I  think,  the  particular  form  of  Mn 
Pitt's  criticism,  for  a  quick  succession  of  fine  shades  of  feeling 
of  this  kind  could  never  have  been  delineated  in  a  painting,  or 
indeed  in  a  series  of  paintings,  at  all,  while  they  are  so  given  in 
the  poem.  But  the  praise  itself  if  not  its  exact  form,  is  amply  de- 
served. The  singular  depth  of  the  romantic  glow  in  this  passage, 
and  its  equally  singular  simplicity, — a  simplicity  which  makes  it  in- 
telligible to  every  one, — are  conspicuous  to  every  reader.  It  is  not 
what  is  called  classical  poetry,  for  there  is  no  severe  outline, — no 
sculptured  completeness  and  repose, — no  satisfying  wholeness  of 
effect  to  the  eye  of  the  mind, — no  embodiment  of  a  great  action. 
The  poet  gives  us  a  breath,  a  ripple  of  alternating  fear  and  hope  in 
the  heart  of  an  old  man,  and  that  is  all.  He  catches  an  emotion  that 
had  its  roots  deep  in  the  past,  and  that  is  striving  onward  towards 
something  ic  the  future  • — he  traces  the  wistfulness  and  self-distrust 
with  which  age  seeks  to  recover  the  feelings  of  youth, — the  delight 
with  which  it  greets  them  when  they  come, — the  hesitation  and 
diffidence  with  which  it  recalls  them  as  they  pass  away,  and  ques- 
tions the  triumph  it  has  just  w^on,— and  he  paints  all  this  without 
subtlety,  without  complexit}^  but  with  a  swiftness  such  as  few 
poets  ever  surpassed.  Generally,  however,  Scott  prefers  action 
itself  for  his  subject,  to  any  feeling,  however  active  in  its  bent. 
The  cases  in  which  he  makes  a  study  of  any  mood  of  feeling,  as  he 
does  of  this  harper's  feeling,  are  comparatively  rare.  Deloraine's 
night-ride  to  Melrose  is  a  good  deal  more  in  Scott's  ordinary  w^ay 
than  this  study  of  the  old  harper's  wistful  mood.  But  whatever  his 
subject,  his  treatment  of  it  is  the  same.  His  lines  are  always 
strongly  drawn  ;  his  handling  is  always  simple :  and  his  subject 
always  romantic.  But  though  romantic,  it  is  simple  almost  to 
bareness,— one  of  the  great  causes  both  of  his  popularity,  and  of 
that  deficiency  in  his  poetry  of  which  so  many  of  his  admirers  be- 
come conscious  when  they  compare  him  with  other  and  richer 
poets.  Scott  used  to  say  that  in  poetry  Byron  '^bet  "  him  ;  and  no 
doubt  that  in  which  chiefly  as  a  poet  he  *^bet"  him,  was  in  the 
variety,  the  richness,  the  lustre  of  his  effects.  A  certain  rugged- 
ness  and  bareness  was  of  the  essence  of  Scott's  idealism  and  ro- 
mance. It  was  so  in  relation  to  scenery.  He  told  Washinglon 
Irving  that  he  loved  the  very  nakedness  of  the  Border  country. 
It  has  something,"  he  said,    bold  and  stern  and  solitary  about  it. 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


39 


When  I  have  been  for  some  time  in  the  rich  scenery  about  Edin- 
burgh, which  is  like  ornamented  garden-land,  I  begin  to  wish  my- 
self back  again  among  my  honest  grey  hills,  and  if  I  did  not  see  the 
heather  at  least  once  a  year,  /  think  I  should  diey^  Now,  the 
bareness  which  Scott  so  loved  in  his  native  scenery,  there  is  in  all 
his  romantic  elements  of  feehng.  It  is  while  he  is  bold  and  stern, 
that  he  is  at  his  highest  ideal  point.  Directly  he  begins  to  attempt 
rich  or  pretty  subjects,  as  in  parts  of  The  Lady  of  the  Lake^  and  a 
good  deal  of  The  Lord  of  the  Isles ^  and  still  more  in  The  Bridal  of 
T^Herjnain,  his  charm  disappears.  It  is  in  painting  those  moods 
and  exploits,  in  relation  to  which  Scott  shares  most  completely  the 
feelings  of  ordinary  men,  but  experiences  them  with  far  greater 
strength  and  purity  than  ordinary  men,  that  he  triumphs  as  a  poet. 
Mr.  Lockhart  tells  us  that  some  of  Scott's  senses  were  decidedly 
"  blunt,"  and  one  seems  to  recognise  this  in  the  simplicity  of  his 
romantic  effects.  "It  is  a  fact,"  he  says,  "  which  some  philoso- 
phers may  think  worth  setting  down,  that  Scott's  organisation, 
as  to  more  than  one  of  the  senses,  was  the  reverse  of  exquisite. 
He  had  very  little  of  what  musicians  call  an  ear;  his  smell 
was  hardly  more  delicate.  I  have  seen  him  stare  about,  quite 
unconscious  of  the  cause,  when  his  whole  company  betrayed  their 
uneasiness  at  the  approach  of  an  overkept  haunch  of  venison ; 
and  neither  by  the  nose  nor  the  palate  could  he  distinguish  corked 
wine  from  sound.  He  could  never  tell  Madeira  from  sherry, — nay, 
an  Oriental  friend  having  sent  him  a  butt  of  sheeraz^  when  he  re- 
membered the  circumstance  some  time  afterwards  and  called  for  a 
bottle  to  have  Sir  John  Malcolm's  opinion  of  its  quality,  it  turned 
out  that  his  butler,  mistaking  the  label,  had  already  served  up  half 
the  bin  as  sherry.  Port  he  considered  as  physic  ...  in  truth  he 
liked  no  wines  except  sparkling  champagne  and  claret ;  but  even 
as  to  the  last  he  was  no  connoisseur,  and  sincerely  preferred  a 
tumbler  of  whisky-toddy  to  the  most  precious  *  liquid-ruby '  that 
ever  flowed  in  the  cup  of  a  prince."  f 

However,  Scott's  eye  was  very  keen  : — "  It  was  co7nmo7ily  hiiUy* 
as  his  little  son  once  said,  that  saw  the  hare  sittingP  And  his 
perception  of  colour  was  very  delicate  as  well  as  his  mere  sight. 
As  Mr.  Ruskin  has  pointed  out,  his  landscape  painting  is  almost 
all  done  by  the  lucid  use  of  colour.  Nevertheless  this  bluntness 
of  organisation  in  relation  to  the  less  important  senses,  no  doubt 
contributed  something  to  the  singleness  and  simpHcity  of  the  deeper 
and  more  vital  of  Scott's  romantic  impressions  ;  at  least  there  is 
good  reason  to  suppose  that  delicate  and  complicated  susceptibilities 
do  at  least  diminish  the  chance  of  living  a  strong  and  concentrated 
life — do  risk  the  frittering  away  of  feeling  on  the  mere  backwaters 
of  sensations,  even  if  they  do  not  directly  tend  towards  artificial 
and  indirect  forms  of  character.  Scott's  romance  is  like  his  native 
scenery, — bold,  bare  and  rugged,  with  a  swift  deep  stream  of  strong 
pure  feehng  running  through  it.    There  is  plenty  of  colour  in  his 


*  Lockhart's  Life  of  Scott ^  v.  248. 


t  Lockhart's  Life  of  Scott  ^  v.  338. 


40 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT 


pictures,  as  there  is  on  the  Scotch  hills  when  the  heather  is  out. 
And  so  too  there  is  plenty  of  intensity  in  his  romantic  situations  ; 
but  it  is  the  intensity  of  simple,  natural,  unsophisticated,  hardy, 
and  manly  characters.  But  as  for  subtleties  and  fine  shades  of 
feeling  in  his  poems,  or  anything  like  -  the  manifold  harmonies  of 
the  richer  arts,  they  are  not  to  be  found,  or,  if  such  complicated 
shading  is  to  be  found — and  it  is  perhaps  attempted  in  some  faint 
measure  in  The  Bridal  of  Triermain^  the  poem  in  which  Scott 
tried  to  pass  himself  off  for  Erskine, — it  is  only  at  the  expense  of 
the  higher  qualities  of  his  romantic  poetry,  that  even  in  this  small 
measure  it  is  supplied.  Again,  there  is  no  rich  music  in  his  verse. 
It  is  its  rapid  onset,  its  hurrying  strength,  which  so  fixes  it  in  the 
mind. 

It  was  not  till  1808,  three  years  after  the  publication  of  The 
Lay,  that  Mannion,  Scott's  greatest  poem,  was  published.  But 
I  may  as  well  say  what  seems  necessary  of  that  and  his  other  poems, 
while  I  am  on  the  subject  of  his  poetry.  Marmion  has  all  the 
advantage  over  The  Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel  a  coherent  story 
told  with  force  and  fulness,  and  concerned  v/ith  the  same  class  of 
subjects  as  The  Lay,  must  have  over  a  confused  and  ill-managed 
legend,  the  only  original  purpose  of  which  was  to  serve  as  the 
opportunity  for  a  picture  of  Border  life  and  strife.  Scott's  poems, 
have  sometimes  been  depreciated  as  mere  novelettes  in  verse,  and 
I  think  that  some  of  them  may  be  more  or  less  liable  to  this  criti- 
cism. For  instance,  The  Lady  of  the  Lake,  with  the  exception  of 
two  or  three  brilliant  passages,  has  always  seemed  to  me  more  of  a 
versified  novelette, — without  the  higher  and  broader  character- 
istics of  Scott's  prose  novels — than  of  a  poem.  I  suppose  what 
one  expects  from  a  poem  as  distinguished  from  a  romance — even 
though  the  poem  incorporates  a  story — is  that  it  should  not  rest  for 
its  chief  interest  on  the  mere  development  of  the  story  ;  but  rather 
that  the  narrative  should  be  quite  subordinate  to  that  insight  into 
the  deeper  side  of  life  and  manners,  in  expressing  which  poetry  has 
so  great  an  advantage  over  prose.  Of  The  Lay  and  Martnion  this  is 
true  ;  less  true  of  The  Lady  of  the  Lake,  and  still  less  of  Rokeby, 
or  The  L^ord  of  the  Isles,  and  this  is  why  The  Lay  and  Marinioji 
seem  so  much  superior  as  poems  to  the  others.  They  lean  less  on 
the  interest  of  mere  incident,  more  on  that  of  romantic  feeling  and 
the  great  social  and  historic  features  of  the  day.  Marmion  was 
composed  in  great  part  in  the  saddle,  and  the  stir  of  a  charge  of 
cavalry  seems  to  be  at  the  very  core  of  it.  "  For  myself,''  said 
Scott,  writing  to  a  lady  correspondent  at  a  time  when  he  was  in 
active  service  as  a  volunteer,  "  I  must  own  that  to  one  who  has, 
like  myself,  la  tete  un  peii  exalt^e,  the  pomp  and  circumstance  of 
war  gives  for  a  time  a  very  poignant  and  pleasing  sensation."  *  And 
you  feel  this  all  through  Marrftion  even  more  than  in  The  Lay. 
Mr.  Darwin  would  probably  say  that  Auld  Wat  of  Harden  had 
about  as  much  responsibility  for  Marmion  as  Sir  Walter  himself. 


Lockhart*s  Life  of  Scott^  ii.  137. 


SIJ^  WALTER  SCOTT, 


41 


"  You  will  expect,"  he  wrote  to  the  same  lady,  who  was  personally 
unknown  to  him  at  that  time,  "  to  see  a  person  who  had  dedicated 
himself  to  literary  pursuits,  and  you  will  find  me  a  rattle-skulled, 
half-lawyer,  half-sportsman,  through  whose  head  a  regiment  of  horse 
has  been  exercising  since  he  was  five  years  old."  *  And  wh^t 
Scott  himself  felt  in  relation  to  the  martial  elements  of  his  poetry, 
soldiers  in  the  field  felt  with  equal  force.  ^'  In  the  course  of  the 
day  when  The  Lady  of  the  Lake  first  reached  Sir  Adam  Ferguson, 
he  was  posted  with  his  company  on  a  point  of  ground  exposed  to 
the  enemy's  artillery,  somewhere  no  doubt  on  the  lines  of  Torres 
Vedras.  The  men  were  ordered  to  lie  prostrate  on  the  ground ; 
while  they  kept  that  attitude,  the  captain,  kneeling  at  the  head,  read 
aloud  the  description  of  the  battle  in  Canto  VI.,  and  the  listening 
soldiers  only  interrupted  him  by  a  joyous  huzza  when  the  French 
shot  struck' the  bank  close  above  them."  f  It  is  not  often  that 
martial  poetry  has  been  put  to  such  a  test ;  but  we  can  well  under- 
stand  with  what  rapture  a  Scotch  force  lying  on  the  ground  to 
shelter  from  the  French  fire,  would  enter  into  such  oassages  as  the 
following : — 

Their  light  arm'd  archers  far  and  near 

Survey'd  the  tangled  ground, 
Their  centre  ranks,  with  pike  and  spear, 

A  twilight  forest  frown'd, 
Their  barbed  horsemen,  in  the  rear, 

The  stern  battalia  ciown'd. 
No  cymbal  clash'd,  no  clarion  rang, 

Still  were  the  pipe  and  drum  ; 
Save  heavy  tread,  and  armour's  clang, 

The  sullen  march  was  dumb. 
There  breathed  no  wind  their  crests  to  shake 

Or  wave  their  flags  abroad  ; 
Scarce  the  frail  aspen  seem'd  to  quake, 

That  shadow'd  o'er  their  road. 
Their  vanward  scouts  no  tidings  bring, 

Can  rouse  no  lurking  foe, 
Nor  spy  a  trace  of  living  thing 

Save  when  they  stirr'd  the  roe  ; 
The  host  moves  like  a  deep  sea  wave, 
Where  rise  no  rocks  its  power  to  brave, 

High-swelling,  dark,  and  slow. 
The  lake  is  pass'd,  and  now  they  gain 
A  narrow  and  a  broken  plain, 
Before  the  Trosach's  rugged  jaws, 
And  here  the  horse  and  spearmen  pause, 
While,  to  explore  the  dangerous  glen, 
Dive  through  the  pass  the  archer-men. 

*'  At  once  there  rose  so  wild  a  yell 
Within  that  dark  and  narrow  dell, 

*  Lockhart's  Life  0/ Scotty  ii.  259,  \  Lockharl's  Life  of  Scotty  iii.  ^ij* 


42 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTIZ 


As  all  the  fiends  from  heaven  that  fell 
Had  peal'd  the  banner-cry  of  Hell  ! 

Forth  from  the  pass,  in  tumult  driven, 

Like  chaff  before  the  wind  of  heaven, 
The  archery  appear  ; 

For  life  !  for  life  !  their  plight  they  ply, 

And  shriek,  and  shout,  and  battle-cry, 

And  plaids  and  bonnets  waving  high, 

And  broadswords  flashing  to  the  sky, 
Are  maddening  in  the  rear. 
Onward  they  drive,  in  dreadful  race, 

Pursuers  and  pursued  ; 
Before  that  tide  of  flight  and  chase. 

How  shall  it  keep  its  rooted  place, 
The  spearmen's  twilight  wood  ? 

Down,  down,  cried  Mar,  *  your  lances  down, 
Bear  back  both  friend  and  foe  !  * 

Like  reeds  before  the  tempest's  frown. 
That  serried  grove  of  lances  brown 

At  once  lay  levell'd  low ; 
And,  closely  shouldering  side  to  side, 

The  bristling  ranks  the  onset  bide, — 
*  We'll  quell  the  savage  mountaineer, 

As  their  Tinchel  cows  the  game  ! 
They  came  as  fleet  as  forest  deer. 

We'll  drive  them  back  as  tame.'  " 

But  admirable  in  its  stern  and  deep  excitement  as  that  is,  the 
battle  of  Flodden  in  Mar?nio7i  passes  it  in  vigour,  and  constitutes 
perhaps  the  most  perfect  description  of  war  by  one  who  was — ■ 
almost— both  poet  and  warrior,  which  the  English  language  con- 
tains. 

And  Marmiofi  registers  the  high-water  mark  of  Scott's  poetical 
power,  not  only  in  relation  to  the  painting  of  war,  but  in  relation  to 
the  painting  of  nature.  Critics  from  the  beginning  onwards  have 
complained  of  the  six  introductory  epistles,  as  breaking  the  unity 
of  the  story.  But  I  cannot  see  that  the  remark  has  weight.  No 
poem  is  written  for  those  who  read  it  as  they  do  a  novel — merely 
to  follow  the  interest  of  the  story;  or  if  any  poem  be  written  for 
such  readers,  it  deserves  to  die.  On  such  a  principle — which  treats 
a  poem  as  a  mere  novel  and  nothing  else, — you  might  object  to 
Homer  that  he  interrupts  the  battle  so  often  to  dwell  on  the  origin 
of  the  heroes  who  are  waging  it ;  or  to  Byron  that  he  deserts 
Childe  Harold  to  meditate  on  the  rapture  of  solitude.  To  my 
mind  the  ease  and  frankness  of  these  confessions  of  the  author's 
recollections  give  a  picture  of  his  life  and  character  while  writing 
Marinion^  which  adds  greatly  to  its  attraction  as  a  poem.  You 
have  a  picture  at  once  not  only  of  the  scenery,  but  of  the  mind  in 
which  that  scenery  is  mirrored,  and  are  brought  back  frankly,  at 
fit  intervals,  from  the  one  to  the  other,  in  the  mode  best  adapted  to 
help  you  to  appreciate  the  relation  of  the  poet  to  the  poem.  At 
least  if  Milton's  various  interruptions  of  a  much  more  ambitious 


J//?  WALTER  SCOTT, 


43 


theme,  to  muse  upon  his  own  qualifications  or  disqualifications  for 
the  task  he  had  attempted,  be  not  artistic  mistakes — and  I  never 
heard  of  any  one  who  thought  them  so — I  cannot  see  any  reason 
why  Scott's  periodic  recurrence  to  his  own  personal  history  should 
be  artistic  mistakes  either.  If  Scott's  reverie  was  less  lofty  than 
Milton's,  so  also  was  his  story.  It  seems  to  me  as  fitting  to  de- 
scribe the  relation  between  the  poet  and  his  theme  in  the  one  case 
as  in  the  other.  What  can  be  more  truly  a  part  of  Mannion^  as  a 
poem,  though  not  as  a  story,  than  that  introduction  to  the  first 
canto  in  which  Scott  expresses  his  passionate  sympathy  with  the 
high  national  feeling  of  the  moment,  in  his  tribute  to  Pitt  and  Fox, 
and  then  reproaches  himself  for  attempting  so  great  a  subject  and 
returns  to  what  he  calls  his  "  rude  legend,'*  the  very  essence  of 
which  was,  however,  a  passionate  appeal  to  the  spirit  of  national 
independence  ?  What  can  be  more  germane  to  the  poem  than  the 
delineation  of  the  strength  the  poet  had  derived  from  musing  in  the 
bare  and  rugged  solitudes  of  St.  Mary's  Lake,  in  the  introduction 
to  the  second  canto?  Or  than  the  striking  autobiographical  study 
of  his  own  infancy  which  I  have  before  extracted  from  the  intro- 
duction to  the  third  ?  It  seems  to  me  ihzX  Mar?niou  without  these 
introductions  would  be  like  the  hills  which  border  Yarrow,  without 
the  stream  and  lake  in  which  they  are  reflected. 

Never  at  all  events  in  any  later  poem  was  Scott's  touch  as  a 
mere  painter  so  terse  and  strong.  What  a  picture  of  a  Scotch 
winter  is  given  in  these  few  lines  : — 

"  The  sheep  before  the  pinching  heaven 
To  shelter'd  dale  and  down  are  driven, 
Where  yet  some  faded  herbage  pines, 
And  yet  a  watery  sunbeam  shines  : 
In  meek  despondency  they  eye 
The  withered  sward  and  wintry  skv, 
And  from  beneath  their  summer  hill 
Stray  sadly  by  Glenkinnon's  rill." 

Again,  if  Scott  is  ever  Homeric  (which  I  cannot  think  he  often 
!s,  in  spite  of  Sir  Francis  Doyle's  able  criticism, — he  is  too  short, 
too  sharp,  and  too  eagerly  bent  on  his  rugged  way,  for  a  poet  who 
is  always  delighting  to  find  loopholes,  even  in  battle,  from  which  to 
look  out  upon  the  great  story  of  human  nature),  he  is  certainly 
nearest  to  it  in  such  a  passage  as  this  :- 

The  Tsles-men  carried  at  their  backs 

The  ancient  Danish  battle-axe. 

They  raised  a  wild  and  wonderinsj  cry 

As  with  his  guide  rode  Marmion  by. 

Loud  were  their  clamouring  tongues,  as  when 

The  clanging  sea-fowl  leave  the  fen, 

And,  with  their  cries  discordant  mix'd, 

Grumbled  and  yell'd  the  pipes  betwixt." 


44 


S/A'  WALTER  SCOTT. 


In  hardly  any  of  Scott's  poetry  do  we  find  much  of  what  is 
called  the  curiosa  felicitas  oi  expression, — the  magic  use  of  words, 
as  distinguished  from  the  mere  general  effect  of  vigour,  purity,  and 
concentration  of  purpose.  But  in  Marniion  occasionally  we  do 
nnd  such  a  use.  Take  this  descripdon,  for  instance,  of  the  Scotch 
tents  near  Edinburgh  : — 

"  A  thousand  did  I  say  ?    I  ween 
Thousands  on  thousands  there  were  seen, 
That  chequer'd  all  the  heath  between 

The  streamlet  and  the  town  ; 
In  crossing  ranks  extending  far, 
Forming  a  camp  irregular  ; 
Oft  giving  way  where  still  there  stood 
Some  relics  of  the  old  oak  wood, 
That  darkly  huge  did  intervene. 
And  tamed  the  glaring  white  zvith  green  ; 
In  these  extended  lines  there  lay 
A  martial  kingdom's  vast  array.*' 

The  line  I  have  italicized  seems  to  me  to  have  more  of  the 
poet's  special  magic  of  expression  than  is  at  all  usual  with  Scott. 
The  conception  of  the  peaceful  green  oakwood  taming  the  glaring 
white  of  the  tented  field,  is  as  fine  in  idea  as  it  is  in  relation  to  the 
effect  of  the  mere  colour  on  the  eye.  Judge  Scott's  poetry  by 
whatever  test  you  will — whether  it  be  a  test  of  that  which  is 
peculiar  to  it,  its  glow  of  national  feeling,  its  martial  ardour,  its 
swift  and  rugged  simplicity,  or  whether  it  be  a  test  of  that  which  is 
common  to  it  with  most  other  poetry,  its  attraction  for  all  romantic 
excitements,  its  special  feeling  for  the  pomp  and  circumstance  of 
war,  its  love  of  light  and  colour — and  tested  either  way,  Marvtion 
will  remain  his  finest  poem.  The  battle  of  Flodden  Field  touches 
his  highest  point  in  its  expression  of  stern  patriotic  feeling,  in  its 
passionate  love  of  daring,  and  in  the  force  and  swiftness  of  its 
movement,  no  less  than  in  the  brilliancy  of  its  romantic  interests,  the 
charm  of  its  picturesque  detail,  and  the  glow  of  its  scenic  colouring. 
No  poet  ever  equalled  Scott  in  the  description  of  wild  and  simple 
scenes  and  the  expression  of  wild  and  simple  feelings.  But  I  have 
said  enough  now  of  his  poetry,  in  which,  good  as  it  is,  Scott's 
genius  did  not  reach  its  highest  point.  The  hurried  tramp  of  his 
somewhat  monotonous  metre,  is  apt  to  wearv  the  ears  of  men  who 
do  not  find  their  sufficient  happiness,  as  he  did,  in  dreaming  of  the 
wild  and  daring  enterprises  of  his  loved  Border-land,  l1ie  very 
quality  in  his  verse  which  makes  it  seize  so  powerfully  on  the 
imaginations  of  plain,  bold,  adventurous  men,  often  makes  it  ham- 
mer fatiguingly  against  the  brain  of  those  who  need  the  relief  of  a 
wider  horizon  and  a  richer  world. 


SJA'  WALTER  SC0T7\ 


45 


CHAPTER  VI. 

COMPANIONS  AND  FRIENDS. 

I  HAVE  anticipated  in  some  degree,  in  speaking  of  Scott^s  later 
poetical  works,  what,  in  point  of  time  at  least,  should  follow  some 
slight  sketch  of  his  chosen  companions,  and  of  his  occupations  in 
the  first  period  of  his  married  life.  Scott's  most  intimate  friend 
for  some  time  after  he  went  to  college,  probably  the  one  who  most 
stimulated  his  imagination  in  his  youth,  and  certainly  one  of  his 
most  intimate  friends  to  the  very  last,  was  William  Clerk,  who  was 
called  to  the  bar  on  the  same  day  as  Scott.  He  was  the  son  of 
Jolm  Clerk  of  Eldin,  the  author  of  a  book  of  some  celebrity  in  its 
time  on  Naval  Tactics.  Even  in  the  earliest  days  of  this  intimacy, 
the  lads  who  had  been  Scott's  fellow-apprentices  in  his  father's 
office,  saw  with  some  jealousy  his  growing  friendship  with  William 
Clerk,  and  remonstrated  with  Scott  on  the  decline  of  his  regard  for 
them,  but  only  succeeded  in  eliciting  from  him  one  of  those  out- 
bursts of  peremptory  frankness  which  anything  that  he  regarded  as 
an  attempt  to  encroach  on  his  own  interior  liberty  of  choice  always 
provoked.  I  will  never  cut  any  man,"  he  said,  unless  I  detect 
him  in  scoundrelism,  but  I  know  not  what  right  any  of  you  have  to 
interfere  with  my  choice  of  my  company.  As  it  is,  I  fairly  own 
that  though  I  like  many  of  you  very  much,  and  have  long  done  so, 
I  think  William  Clerk  well  worth  you  all  put  together."*  Scott 
never  lost  the  friendship  which  began  with  this  eager  enthusiasm, 
but  his  chief  intimacy  with  Clerk  was  during  his  younger  days. 

In  1808  Scott  describes  Clerk  as  "  a  man  of  the  most  acute  in- 
tellect and  powerful  apprehension,  who  if  he  should  ever  shake  loose 
the  fetters  of  indolence  by  which  he  has  been  hitherto  trammelled, 
cannot  fail  to  be  distinguished  in  the  highest  degree."  Whether 
for  the  reason  suggested,  or  for  some  other.  Clerk  never  actually 
gained  any  other  distinction  so  great  as  his  friendship  with  Scott 
conferred  upon  him.  Probably  Scott  had  discerned  the  true  secret 
of  his  friend's  comparative  obscurity.  Even  while  preparing  for 
the  bar,  when  they  had  agreed  to  go  on  alternate  mornings  to  each 
other's  lodgings  to  read  together,  Scott  found  it  necessary  to 
modify  the  arrangement  by  always  visiting  his  friend,  whom  he 
usually  found  in  bed.    It  was  William  Clerk  who  sat  for  the  picture 

*  J^ckhart's  Life  0/ Scoit^  i.  214, 


S//^  WALTER  SCOTT. 


of  Darsie  Latimer,  the  hero  of  Redcratmilct^ — whence  we  should 
suppose  him  to  have  been  a  lively,  generous,  susceptible,  conten 
tious,  and  rather  helter-skelter  young  man,  much  alive  to  the  ludicrous 
in  all  situations,  very  eager  to  see  life  in  all  its  phases,  and  some- 
what vain  of  his  power  of  adapting  himself  equally  to  all  these 
phases.  Scott  tells  a  story  of  Clerk's  being  once  baffled — almost 
for  the  first  time — by  a  stranger  in  a  stage  coach,  who  would  not, 
or  could  not,  talk  to  him  on  any  subject,  until  at  last  Clerk  ad- 
dressed to  him  this  stately  remonstrance,  "  I  have  talked  to  you, 
my  friend,  on  all  the  ordinary  subjects — literature,  farming, 
merchandise,  gaming,  game-laws,  horse-races,  suits-at-law,  politics, 
swindling,  blasphemy,  and  philosophy, — is  there  any  one  subject 
that  you  will  favour  me  by  opening  upon  ?  "  "  Sir,''  replied  the 
inscrutable  stranger,  ^'  can  you  say  anything  clever  about  '  bend- 
leather  f^''^  No  doubt  this  superficial  familiarity  with  a  vast 
number  of  subjects  was  a  great  fascination  to  Scott,  and  a  great 
stimulus  to  his  own  imagination.  To  the  last  he  held  the  same 
opinion  of  his  friend's  latent  powers.  "  To  my  thinking,"  he  wrote 
in  his  diary  in  1825,  ^' I  never  met  a  man  of  greater  powers,  of 
more  complete  information  on  all  desirable  subjects."  But  in 
youth  at  least  Clerk  seems  to  have  had  what  Sir  Walter  calls  a 
characteristic  Edinburgh  complaint,  the  itch  for  disputation,'* 
and  though  he  softened  this  down  in  later  life,  he  had  always  that 
slight  contentiousness  of  bias  which  enthusiastic  men  do  not  often 
heartily  like,  and  which  may  have  prevented  Scott  from  continuing 
to  the 'full  the  close  intimacy  of  those  earlier  years.  Yet  almost 
his  last  record  of  a  really  delightful  evening,  refers  to  a  bachelors 
dinner  given  by  Mr.  Clerk,  who  remained  unmarried,  as  late  as 
1827,  after  all  Sir  Walter's  worst  troubles  had  come  upon  him. 

In  short,"  says  the  diary,  ^'  we  really  laughed,  and  real  laughter 
is  as  rare  as  real  tears.  I  must  say,  too,  there  was  a  hearty  a 
kindly  feeling  prevailed  over  the  party.  Can  London  give  such  a 
dinner.^"!  It  is  clear,  then,  that  Clerk's  charm  for  his  friend 
survived  to  the  last,  and  that  it  was  not  the  mere  inexperience  of 
boyhood,  which  made  Scott  esteem  him  so  highly  in  his  early 
days. 

If  Clerk  pricked,  stimulated,  and  sometimes  badgered  Scott, 
another  of  his  friends  who  became  more  and  more  intimate  with 
him,  as  life  went  on,  and  who  died  before  him,  always  soothed  him, 
partly  by  his  gentleness,  partly  by  his  almost  feminine  dependence. 
This  was  William  Erskine,  also  a  barrister,  and  son  of  an  Epis- 
copalian clergyman  in  Perthshire, — to  whose  influence  it  is  probably 
due  that  Scott  himself  always  read  the  English  Church  service  in 
own  country  house,  and  does  not  appear  to  have  retained  the  Pres- 
byterianism  into  which  he  was  born.  Erskine,  who  was  afterwards 
raised  to  the  Bench  as  Lord  Kinnedder — a  distinction  which  he 
did  not  survive  for  many  months — was  a  good  classic,  a  man  of 
fine,  or,  as  some  of  his  companions  thought,  of  almost  superfine 

*  Lockhart's  Life  0/  Scott ^  iii.  344.  t  Lockhart's  Li/e 0/ Scott,  ix.  75. 


S//^  WALTER  SCOTT. 


47 


taste.  The  style  apparently  for  which  he  had  credit  must  have 
been  a  somewhat  mimini-pimini  style,  if  we  may  judge  by  Scott's 
attempt  in  The  Bridal  of  Trlennam^  to  write  in  a  manner  wliich 
he  intended  to  be  attributed  to  his  friend.  Erskine  was  left  a 
widower  in  middle  life,  and  Scott  used  to  accuse  him  of  philander- 
ing with  pretty  women, — a  mode  of  love-making  which  Scott  certainly 
contrived  to  render  into  verse,  in  painting  Arthur's  love-making  to 
Lucy  in  that  poem.  It  seems  that  some  absolutely  false  accusation 
brought  against  Lord  Kinnedder,  of  an  intrigue  with  a  lady  with 
whom  he  had  been  thus  philandering,  broke  poor  Erskine's  heart, 
during  his  first  year  as  a  Judge.  The  Counsellor  (as  Scott  always 
called  him)  was,"  says  IVlr.  Lockhart,  "  a  little  man  of  feeble  make, 
who  seemed  unhappy  when  his  pony  got  beyond  a  footpace,  and 
had  never,  I  should  suppose,  addicted  himself  to  any  out  of  door's 
sports  whatever.  He  would,  I  fancy,  as  soon  have  thought  of  slay- 
ing his  own  mutton  as  of  handling  a  fowhng-piece ;  he  used  to 
shudder  when  he  saw  a  party  equipped  for  coursing,  as  if  murder 
was  in  the  wind ;  but  the  cool,  meditative  angler  was  in  his  eyes 
the  abomination  of  abominations.  His  small  elegant  features, 
hectic  cheek  and  soft  hazel  eyes,  were  the  index  of  the  quick, 
sensitive,  gentle  spirit  within."  "He  would  dismount  to  lead  his 
horse  down  what  his  friend  hardly  perceived  to  be  a  descent  at  all ; 
grew  pale  at  a  precipice ;  and,  unlike  the  white  lady  of  Avenel, 
would  go  a  long  way  round  for  a  bridge."  He  shrank  from  general 
society,  and  lived  in  closer  intimacies,  and  his  intimacy  with  Scott 
was  of  the  closest.  He  was  Scott's  confident  in  all  literary  matters, 
and  his  advice  was  oftener  followed  on  questions  of  style  and  form, 
and  of  literary  enterprise,  than  that  of  any  other  of  Scott's  friends. 
It  is  into  Erskine's  mouth  that  Scott  puts  the  supposed  exhor- 
tation to  himself  to  choose  more  classical  subjects  for  his  poems  : — 

**  *  Approach  those  masters  o'er  whose  tomb 
Immortal  laurels  ever  bloom  ; 
Instructive  of  the  feebler  bard. 
Still  from  the  grave  their  voice  is  heard ; 
From  them,  and  from  the  paths  they  show'd, 
Choose  honoured  guide  and  practised  road; 
Nor  ramble  on  through  brake  and  maze, 
With  harpers  rude  of  barbarous  days." 

And  it  is  to  Erskine  that  Scott  replies, — 

"  For  me,  thus  nurtured,  dost  thou  ask 
The  classic  poet's  well-conn'd  task  ? 
Nay,  Erskine,  nay, — on  the  wild  hill 
Let  the  wild  heath-bell  flourish  still ; 
Cherish  the  tulip,  prune  the  vine, 
But  freely  let  the  woodbine  twine, 
And  leave  untrimm'd  the  eglantine: 
Nay,  my  friend,  nay, — since  oft  thy  praise 
Hath  given  fresh  vigour  to  my  lays ; 


48 


S/A'  WALTER  SCOTT. 


Since  oft  thy  judgment  could  refine 
My  flatten'd  thought  or  cumbrous  line, 
Still  kind,  as  is  thy  wont,  attend. 
And  in  the  minstrel  spare  the  friend  !" 

It  was  Erskine,  too,  as  Scott  expressly  states  in  his  introduction 
to  the  Chro7ilcles  of  the  Canongate^  who  reviewed  with  far  too 
much  partiality  the  Tales  of  my  Landlord,  in  the  Quarterly  Review^ 
for  January,  1817, — a  review  unjustifiably  included  among  Scott's 
own  critical  essays,  on  the  very  insufficient  ground  that  the  MS. 
reached  Murray  in  Scott's  own  handwriting.  There  can,  however, 
be  no  doubt  at  all  that  Scott  copied  out  his  friend's  MS.,  in  order 
to  increase  the  mystification  which  he  so  much  enjoyed  as  to  the 
authorship  of  his  variously  named  series  of  tales.  Possibly  enough, 
too,  he  may  have  drawn  Erskine's  attention  to  the  evidence  which 
justified  his  sketch  of  the  Puritans  in  Old  Mortality,  evidence 
which  he  certainly  intended  at  one  time  to  embody  in  a  reply  of  his 
own  to  the  adverse  criticism  on  that  book.  But  though  Erskine 
was  Scott's  ^^//^r  ^^^>  for  literary  purposes,  it  is  certain  that  Erskine, 
with  his  fastidious,  not  to  say  finical,  sense  of  honour,  would  never 
have  lent  his  name  to  cover  a  puff  written  by  Scott  of  his  own 
works.  A  man  who,  in  Scott's  own  words,  died  "a  victim  to  a 
hellishly  false  stor}^,  or  rather,  I  should  say,  to  the  sensibility  of 
his  own  nature,  which  could  not  endure  even  the  shadow  of  re- 
proach,— like  the  ermine,  which  is  said  to  pine  if  its  fur  is  soiled," 
was  not  the  man  to  father  a  puff,  even  by  his  dearest  friend,  on 
that  friend's  own  creations.  Erskine  was  indeed  almost  feminine 
in  his  love  of  Scott;  but  he  was  feminine  with  all  the  irritable  and 
scrupulous  delicacy  of  a  man  who  could  not  derogate  from  his  own 
ideal  of  right,  even  to  serve  a  friend. 

Another  friend  of  Scott's  earlier  days  was  John  Leyden,  Scott's 
most  efficient  coadjutor  in  the  collection  of  the  Border  Minstrelsy^ 
— that  eccentric  genius,  marvellous  linguist,  and  good-natured  bear, 
who,  bred  a  shepherd  in  one  of  the  wildest  valleys  of  Roxburghshire, 
had  accumulated  before  the  age  of  nineteen  an  amount  of  learning 
which  confounded  the  Edinburgh  Professors,  and  who,  without 
any  previous  knowledge  of  medicine,  prepared  himself  to  pass  an 
examination  for  the  medical  profession,  at  six  months'  notice  of 
the  offer  of  an  assistant-surgeoncy  in  the  East  India  Company.  It 
was  Leyden  who  once  walked  between  forty  and  fifty  miles  and 
back,  for  the  sole  purpose  of  visiting  an  old  person  who  possessed 
a  copy  of  a  border  ballad  that  was  wanting  for  the  Minstrelsy. 
Scott  was  sitting  at  dinner  one  day  with  company,  when  he  heard 
a  sound  at  a  distance,  ^' like  that  of  the  whistling  of  a  tempest 
through  the  torn  rigging  of  a  vessel  which  scuds  before  it.  The 
sounds  increased  as  they  approached  more  near ;  and  Leyden  (to 
tlie  great  astonishment  of  such  of  the  guests  as  did  not  know  him) 
burst  into  the  room  chanting  the  desiderated  ballad  with  the  most 
enthusiastic  gesture,  and  all  the  energy  of  what  he  used  to  call  the 
saw-tones  of  his  voice."  *    Leyden's  great  antipathy  was  Ritson,  aa 

*  Lockhart's  Life  of  Scott,  ii.  56. 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT, 


49 


ill-conditioned  antiquarian,  of  vegetarian  principles,  whom  Scott  alone 
of  all  the  antiquarians  of  that  day  could  manage  to  tame  and  tolerate. 
In  Scott's  absence  one  day,  during  his  early  married  life  at  Lass- 
wade,  Mrs.  Scott  inadvertently  offered  Ritson  a  slice  of  beef,  when 
that  strange  man  burst  out  in  such  outrageous  tones  at  what  he 
chose  to  suppose  an  insult,  that  Leyden  threatened  to  "  thraw  his 
neck"  if  he  were  not  silent,  a  threat  which  frightened  Ritson  out 
of  the  cottage.  On  another  occasion,  simply  in  order  to  tease 
Ritson,  Leyden  complained  that  the  meat  was  overdone,  and  sent 
to  tlie  kitchen  for  a  plate  of  literally  raw  beef,  and  ate  it  up  solely 
for  the  purpose  of  shocking  his  crazy  rival  in  antiquarian  research. 
Poor  Leyden  did  not  long  survive  his  experience  of  the  Indian 
climate.  And  with  him  died  a  passion  for  knowledge  of  a  very 
high  order,  combined  with  no  inconsiderable  poetical  gifts.  It  was 
in  the  study  of  such  eccentric  beings  as  Leyden  that  Scott  doubt- 
less acquired  his  taste  for  painting  the  humours  of  Scotch  character. 

Another  wild  shepherd,  and  wilder  genius  among  Scott's  asso- 
ciates, not  only  in  those  earlier  days,  but  to  the  end,  was  that 
famous  Ettrick  Shepherd,  James  Hogg,  who  was  always  quarrelling 
with  his  brother  poet,  as  far  as  Scott  permitted  it,  and  making  it  up 
again  when  his  better  feelings  returned.  In  a  shepherd's  dress, 
and  with  hands  fresh  from  sheep-shearing,  he  came  to  dine  for  the 
first  time  with  Scott  in  the  Castle  Street,  and  finding  Mrs.  Scott 
lying  on  the  sofa,  immediately  stretched  himself  at  full  length  on 
another  sofa;  for,  as  he  explained  afterwards,  "  I  thought  I  could 
not  do  better  than  to  imitate  the  lady  of  the  house."  At  dinner, 
as  the  wine  passed,  he  advanced  from  "Mr.  Scott,'*  to  "Shirra" 
(Sheriff),  "Scott,''  "Walter,"  and  finally  "  Wattie,"  till  at  supper 
he  convulsed  every  one  by  addressing  Mrs.  Scott  familiarly  as 
"  Charlotte."  *  Hogg  wrote  certain  short  poems,  the  beauty  of  which 
in  their  kind  Sir  Walter  himself  never  approached;  but  he  was  a 
man  almost  without  self-restraint  or  self-knowledge,  though  he  had 
a  great  deal  of  self-importance,  and  hardly  knew  how  much  he 
owed  to  Scott's  magnanimous  and  ever-forbearing  kindness,  or  if 
lie  did,  felt  the  weight  of  gratitude  a  burden  on  his  heart.  Very 
different  was  William  Laidlaw,  a  farmer  on  the  banks  of  the  Yar- 
row, always  Scott's  friend,  and  afterwards  his  manager  at  Abbots- 
ford,  through  whose  hand  he  dictated  many  of  his  novels.  Mr. 
Laidlaw  was  one  of  Scott's  humbler  friends, — a  class  of  friends  with 
whom  he  seems  always  to  have  felt  more  completely  at  his  ease 
than  any  others — who  gave  at  least  as  much  as  he  received,  one  of 
those  wise,  loyal,  and  thoughtful  men  in  a  comparatively  modest 
position  of  life,  whom  Scott  delighted  to  trust,  and  never  trusted 
without  finding  his  trust  justified.  In  addition  to  these  Scotch 
friends,  Scott  had  made,  even  before  the  publication  of  his  Border 
Minstrelsy^  not  a  few  in  London  or  its  neighbourhood, — of  v;hom 
the  most  important  at  this  time  was  the  grey-eyed,  hatchet-faced, 
courteous  George  Ellis,  as  Leyden  described  him,  the  author  of 

*  Lockhart's  Life  of  Scott ^  ii.  168-9. 
4. 


so 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


various  works  on  ancient  English  poetry  and  romance,  who  combined 
with  a  shrewd,  satirical  vein,  and  a  great  knowledge  of  the  world, 
political  as  well  as  literary,  an  exquisite  taste  in  poetry,  and  a  warm 
heart.  Certainly  Ellis's  criticism  on  his  poems  was  the  truest  and 
best  that  Scott  ever  received  ;  and  had  he  lived  to  read  his  novels, 
' — only  one  of  which  was  published  before  Ellis's  death,— he  might 
have  given  Scott  more  useful  help  than  either  Ballantyne  or  even 
Erskine. 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


CHAPTER  VII. 

FIRST  COUNTRY  HOMES. 

So  completely  was  Scott  by  nature  an  out-of-doors  man  that  he 
cannot  be  adequately  known  either  through  his  poems  or  through 
his  friends,  without  also  knowing  his  external  surroundings  and 
occupations.  His  first  country  home  was  the  cottage  at  Lasswade, 
on  the  Esk,  about  six  miles  from  Edinburgh,  which  he  took  in  1798, 
a  few  months  after  his  marriage,  and  retained  till  1804.  It  was  a 
pretty  Httle  cottage,  in  the  beautification  of  which  Scott  felt  great 
pride,  and  where  he  exercised  himself  in  the  small  beginnings  of 
those  tastes  for  altering  and  planting  which  grew  so  rapidly  upon 
him,  and  at  last  enticed  him  into  castle-building  and  tree-culture 
on  a  dangerous,  not  to  say,  ruinous  scale.  One  of  Scott's  intimate 
friends,  the  master  of  Rokeby,  by  whose  house  and  neighbourhood 
the  poem  of  that  name  was  suggested,  Mr.  Morritt,  walked  along 
the  Esk  in  1808  with  Scott  four  years  after  he  had  left  it,  and  was 
taken  out  of  his  way  to  see  it.  "  I  have  been  bringing  you,  he  said, 
*'  where  there  is  little  enough  to  be  seen,  only  that  Scotch  cottage, 
but  though  not  worth  looking  at,  I  could  not  pass  it.  It  was  our 
first  country  house  when  newly  married,  and  many  a  contrivance  it 
had  to  make  it  comfortable.  I  made  a  dining-table  for  it  with  my 
own  hands.  Look  at  these  two  miserable  willow-trees  on  either 
side  the  gate  into  the  enclosure  ;  they  are  tied  together  at  the  top 
to  be  an  arch,  and  a  cross  made  of  two  sticks  over  them  is  not  yet 
decayed.  To  be  sure  it  is  not  much  of  a  lion  to  show  a  stranger  ; 
but  I  wanted  to  see  it  again  myself,  for  I  assure  you  that  after  I 
had  constructed  it,  inamina  (Mrs.  Scott)  and  I  both  of  us  thought 
it  so  fine,  we  turned  out  to  see  it  by  moonlight,  and  walked  back- 
wards from  it  to  the  cottage-door,  in  admiration  of  our  own  mag- 
nificence and  its  picturesque  effect."  It  was  here  at  Lasswade  that 
he  bought  the  phaeton,  which  was  the  first  wheeled  carriage  that 
ever  penetrated  to  Liddesdale,  a  feat  which  it  accomplished  in  the 
first  August  of  this  century. 

When  Scott  left  the  cottage  at  Lasswade  in  1804,  it  was  to  take 
up  his  country  residence  in  Selkirkshire,  of  which  he  had  now  been 
made  sheriff,  in  a  beautiful  little  house  belonging  to  his  cousin, 
Major-General  Sir  James  Russell,  and  known  to  all  the  readers  of 
Scott's  poetry  as  the  Ashestiel  of  the  Marmion  introductions. 


S//^  M^ALTEj^  SCOTT. 


The  Glenkinnon  brook  dashes  in  a  deep  ravine  through  the 
grounds  to  join  the  Tweed  ;  behind  the  house  rise  the  hills  which 
divide  the  Tweed  from  the  Yarrow  ;  and  an  easy  ride  took  Scott 
into  the  scenery  of  the  Yarrow.  The  description  of  Ashestiel,  and 
the  brook  which  runs  through  it,  in  the  introduction  to  the  first 
canto  of  Mannio7i  is  indeed  one  of  the  finest  specimens  of  Scott's 
descriptive  poetry  ; — 

November's  sky  is  chill  and  drear, 
November's  leaf  is  red  and  sear  ; 
Late,  gazing  down  the  steepy  linn, 
That  hems  our  little  garden  in, 
Low  in  its  dark  and  narrow  glen, 
You  scarce  the  rivulet  might  ken, 
So  thick  the  tangled  greenwood  grew, 
So  feeble  trill'd  the  streamlet  through; 
Nov^,  nmrmuring  hoarse,  ?nd  frequent  seeii, 
Through  bush  and  briar  no  longer  green, 
An  angry  brook,  it  sweeps  the  glade, 
Brawls  over  rock  and  wild  cascade, 
And,  foaming  brown  with  doubled  speed, 
Hurries  its  waters  to  the  Tweed." 

Selkirk  was  his  nearest  town,  and  that  was  seven  miles  from 
Ashestiel;  and  even  his  nearest  neighbour  was  at  Yair,  a  few  miles 
off  lower  down  the  Tweed, — Yair  of  which  he  wrote  in  another  of 
the  introductions  to  Marinion: — 

"  From  Yair,  which  hills  so  closely  bind 
Scarce  can  the  Tweed  his  passage  find, 
Though  much  he  fret,  and  chafe,  and  toil, 
Till  all  his  eddying  currents  boil." 

At  Ashestiel  it  was  one  of  his  greatest  delights  to  look  after 
his  relative's  woods,  and  to  dream  of  planting  and  thinning  woods 
of  his  own,  a  dream  only  too  amply  realized.  It  was  here  that  a 
new  kitchen-range  was  sunk  for  some  time  in  the  ford,  which  was 
so  swollen  by  a  storm  in  1805  that  the  horse  and  cart  that  brought 
it  were  themselves  with  difficulty  rescued  from  the  waters.  And 
it  was  here  that  Scott  first  entered  on  that  active  life  of  literary 
labour  in  close  conjunction  with  an  equally  active  life  of  rural  sport, 
which  gained  him  a  well-justified  reputation  as  the  hardest  worker 
and  heartiest  player  in  the  kingdom.  At  Lasswade  Scott's  work 
had  been  done  at  night  ;  but  serious  headaches  made  him  change 
his  habit  at  Ashestiel,  and  rise  steadily  at  five,  lighting  his  own  fire 
in  winter.  "  Arrayed  in  his  shooting-jacket,  or  whatever  dress  he 
meant  to  use  till  dinner-time,  he  was  seated  at  his  desk  by  six 
o'clock,  all  his  papers  arranged  before  him  in  the  most  accurate 
order,  and  his  books  of  reference  marshalled  around  him  on  the 
floor,  while  at  least  one  favourite  dog  lay  watching  his  eye,  just 
beyond  the  line  of  circumvallalion.  Thus,  by  the  time  the  family 
assembled  for  breakfast,  between  nine  and  ten,  he  had  done  enough, 


.S-/A'  WALTER  SCOTT. 


53 


in  his  own  language,  *  to  break  the  neck  of  the  day's  work.'  After 
breakfast  a  couple  of  hours  more  were  given  to  his  solitary  tasks, 
and  by  noon  he  was,  as  he  used  to  say,  his  'own  man.'  When  the 
weather  was  bad,  he  would  labour  incessantly  all  the  morning ;  but 
the  general  rule  was  to  be  out  and  on  horseback  by  one  o'clock  at 
the  latest  ;  while,  if  any  more  distant  excursion  had  been  proposed 
overnight,  he  was  ready  to  start  on  it  by  ten  ;  his  occasional  rainy 
days  of  unintermitted  study,  forming,  as  he  said,  a  fund  in  his 
favour,  out  of  which  he  was  entitled  to  draw  for  accommodation 
whenever  the  sun  shone  with  special  brightness."  In  his  earlier 
days  none  of  his  horses  liked  to  be  fed  except  by  their  master. 
When  Brown  Adam  was  saddled,  and  the  stable-door  opened,  the 
horse  would  trot  round  to  the  leaping-on  stone  of  his  own  accord, 
to  be  mounted,  and  was  quite  intractable  under  any  one  but  Scott. 
Scott's  life  might  well  be  fairly  divided — just  as  history  is  divided 
into  reigns — by  the  succession  of  his  horses  and  dogs.  The  reigns 
of  Captain,  Lieutenant,  Brown  Adam,  Daisy,  divide  at  least  the 
period  up  to  Waterloo  ;  while  the  reigns  of  Sybil  Grey,  and  the 
Covenanter,  or  Douce  Davie,  divide  the  period  of  Scott's  declining 
years.  During  the  brilliant  period  of  the  earlier  novels  we  hear 
less  of  Scott's  horses  ;  but  of  his  deerhounds  there  is  an  unbroken 
succession.  Camp,  Maida  (the  Bevis"  of  Woodstock)^  and  Nim- 
rod,  reign  successively  between  Sir  Walter's  marriage  and  his 
death.  It  was  Camp  on  whose  death  he  relinquished  a  dinner  in- 
vitation previously  accepted,  on  the  ground  that  the  death  of  "  an 
old  friend  "  rendered  him  unwilling  to  dine  out  ;  Maida  to  whom 
he  erected  a  marble  monument,  and  Nimrod  of  whom  he  spoke  so 
affectingly  as  too  good  a  dog  for  his  diminished  fortunes  during  his 
absence  in  Italy  on  the  last  hopeless  journey. 

Scott's  amusement  at  Ashestiel,  besides  riding,  in  which  he 
was  fearless  to  rashness,  and  coursing,  which  was  the  chief  form 
of  sporting  in  the  neighbourhood,  comprehended  burning  the 
water,"  as  salmon-spearing  by  torchlight  was  called,  in  the  course 
of  which  he  got  many  a  ducking.  Mr.  Skene  gives  an  amusing 
picture  of  their  excursions  together  from  Ashestiel  among  the  hills, 
he  himself  followed  by  a  lanky  Savoyard,  and  Scott  by  a  portly 
Scotch  butler — both  servants  alike  highly  sensitive  as  to  their  per- 
sonal dignity — on  horses  which  neither  of  the  attendants  could  sit 
well.  "  Scott's  heavy  lumbering  buffetier  had  provided  himself 
against  the  mountain  storms  with  a  huge  cloak,  which,  w^hen  the 
cavalcade  was  at  gallop,  streamed  at  full  stretch  from  his  shoul- 
ders, and  kept  flapping  in  the  other's  face,  who,  having  more  than 
enough  to  do  in  preserving  his  own  equilibrium,  could  not  think  of 
attempting  at  any  time  to  control  the  pace  of  his  steed,  and  had  no 
relief  but  fuming  and  pesthig  at  the  sacrS  inaiiteau,  in  language 
happily  unintelligible  to  its  wearer.  Now  and  then  some  ditch  or 
turf-fence  rendered  it  indispensable  to  adventure  on  a  leap,  and  no 
farce  could  have  been  more  amusing  than  the  display  of  politeness 
which  then  occurred  between  these  worthy  equestrians,  each  cour- 
teously declining  in  favour  of  his  friend  the  honour  of  the  first  ex' 


54 


SIR  WALTFP  SCOTT. 


periment,  the  horses  fretting  impatient  beneath  them,  and  the  dogs 
clamouring  encouragement."*  Such  was  Scott's  order  of  hfe  at 
Ashestiel,  where  he  remained  from  1804  to  181 2.  As  to  his  liter- 
ary work  here,  it  was  enormous.  Besides  finishing  The  Lay  of  the 
Last  Minstrel^  writing  Marniion^  The  Lady  of  the  Lake,  part  of 
The  Bridal  of  Trier'7nai7t^  and  part  of  Rokeby,  and  writing  reviews, 
he  wrote  a  Life  of  Dry  den,  and  edited  his  works  anew  with  some 
care,  in  eighteen  volumes,  edited  Soiners^s  Collection  of  Tracts,  in 
thirteen  volumes,  quarto,  Sir  Ralph  Sadler^s  Life,  Letters,  and 
State  Papers^  in  three  volumes,  quarto,  Miss  Seward^ s  Life  and 
Poetical  Works,  The  Secret  History  of  the  Court  of  fames  /.,  in 
two  volumes,  Strut fs  Queenhoo  Hall,  in  four  volumes,  i2mo.,  and 
various  other  single  volumes,  and  began  his  heavy  work  on  the  edi- 
tion of  Swift.  This  was  the  literary  work  of  eight  years,  during 
which  he  had  the  duties  of  his  Sheriffship,  and,  after  he  gave  up 
his  practice  as  a  barrister,  the  duties  of  his  Deputy  Clerkship  of 
Session  to  discharge  regularly.  The  editing  of  Dryden  alone 
would  have  seemed  to  most  men  of  leisure  a  pretty  full  occupation 
for  these  eight  years,  and  though  I  do  not  know  that  Scott  edited 
with  the  anxious  care  with  which  that  sort  of  Vv^ork  is  often  now 
prepared,  that  he  went  into  all  the  arguments  for  a  doubtful  read- 
ing with  the  pains  that  Mr.  Dyce  spent  on  the  various  readings  of 
Shakespeare,  or  that  Mr.  Spedding  spent  on  a  various  reading  of 
Bacon,  yet  Scott  did  his  work  in  a  steady,  workmanlike  manner, 
which  satisfied  the  most  fastidious  critics  of  that  day,  and  he  was 
never,  I  believe,  charged  with  hurrying  or  scamping  it.  His  bio- 
graphies of  Swift  and  Dryden  are  plain  solid  pieces  of  work — not 
exactly  the  works  of  art  which  biographies  have  been  made  in  our 
day— not  comparable  to  Carlyle*s  studies  of  Cromwell  or  Frederick, 
or,  in  point  of  art,  even  to  the  life  of  John  Sterling,  but  still  sensi- 
ble and  interesting,  sound  in  judgment,  and  animated  in  style. 


*  Lockhart's  Life  of  Scott,  ii.  268-9. 


S//^  WALTER  SCOTT. 


55 


CHAPTER  VIII. 

REMOVAL  TO  ABBOTSFORD,  AND  LIFE  THERE. 

In  May,  1812,  Scott  having  now  at  last  obtained  the  salary  of 
the  Clerkship  of  Session,  the  work  of  which  he  had  for  more  than 
five  years  discharged  without  pay,  indulged  himself  in  realising  his 
favourite  dream  of  buying  a  "  mountain  farm  "  at  Abbotsford, — five 
miles  lower  down  the  Tweed  than  his  cottage  at  Ashestiel,  which 
was  now  again  claimed  by  the  family  of  Russell, — and  migrated 
thither  with  his  household  gods.  The  children  long  remembered 
the  leave-taking  as  one  of  pure  grief,  for  the  villagers  were  much 
attached  both  to  Scott  and  to  his  wife,  who  had  made  herself 
greatly  beloved  by  her  untiring  goodness  to  the  sick  among 
her  poor  neighbours.  But  Scott  himself  describes  the  migration 
as  a  scene  in  which  their  neighbours  found  no  small  share  of 
amusement.  "  Our  flitting  and  removal  from  Ashestiel  baffled  all 
description;  we  had  twenty-five  cartloads  of  the  veriest  trash  in 
nature,  besides  dogs,  pigs,  ponies,  poultry,  cows,  calves,  bare-headed 
wenches,  and  bare-breeched  boys."  * 

To  another  friend  Scott  wrote  that  the  neighbours  had  "  been 
much  delighted  with  the  procession  of  my  furniture,  in  which  old 
swords,  bows,  targets,  and  lances,  made  a  very  conspicuous  show. 
A  family  of  turkeys  was  accommodated  within  the  helmet  of  some 
preux  chevalier  oi  ancient  border  fame:  and  the  very  cows,  for 
aught  I  know,  were  bearing  banners  and  muskets.  I  assure  your 
ladyship  that  this  caravan  attended  by  a  dozen  of  ragged  rosy  peas- 
ant children,  carrying  fishing  rods  and  spears,  and  leading  ponies, 
greyhounds,  and  spaniels,  would,  as  it  crossed  the  Tweed,  have 
furnished  no  bad  subject  for  the  pencil,  and  really  reminded  me  of 
one  of  the  gipsy  groups  of  Callot  upon  their  march."  f 

The  place  thus  bought  for  4000/., — half  of  which,  according  to 
Scott's  bad  and  sanguine  habit,  was  borrowed  from  his  brother, 
and  half  raised  on  the  security  of  a  poem  at  the  moment  of  sale 
wholly  unwritten,  and  not  completed  even  when  he  removed  to 
Abbotsford — "  Rokeby  " — became  only  too  much  of  an  idol  for  the 
rest  of  Scott's  life.  Mr.  Lockhart  admits  that  before  the  crash 
came  he  had  invested  29,000/.  in  the  purchase  of  land  alone.  But 


*  Locnhart's  Life  of  Scott  ^  iv.  6. 


t  Lockhart's  Life  cf  Sccii,  iv.  3, 


S/K  WALTER  SCOTT. 


at  this  time  only  the  kernel  of  the  subsequent  estate  was  bouglit, 
in  the  shape  of  a  hundred  acres  or  rather  more,  part  of  which  ran 
along  the  shores  of  the  Tweed— "a  beautiful  river  flowing  broad 
and  bright  over  a  bed  of  milk-white  pebbles,  unless  here  and  there 
where  it  darkened  into  a  deep  pool,  overhung  as  yet  only  by  birches 
and  alders."  There  was  also  a  poor  farm-house,  a  staring  barn, 
and  a  pond  so  dirty  that  it  had  hitherto  given  the  name  of  "  Clarty 
Hole  "  to  the  place  itself.  Scott  re-named  the  place  from  the  ad- 
joining ford  which  was  just  above  the  confluence  of  the  Gala  with 
the  Tweed.  He  chose  the  name  of  Abbotsford  because  the  land 
had  formerly  all  belonged  to  the  Abbots  of  Melrose, — the  ruin  of 
whose  beautiful  abbey  was  visible  from  many  parts  of  the  httle 
property.  On  the  other  side  of  the  river  the  old  British  barrier 
called  "  the  Catrail  was  full  in  view.  As  yet  the  place  was  not 
planted, — the  only  effort  made  in  this  direction  by  its  former 
owner,  Dr.  Douglas,  having  been  a  long  narrow  stripe  of  firs,  which 
Scott  used  to  compare  to  a  black  hair-comb,  and  which  gave  the 
name  of  "  The  Doctor's  Redding-Kame  "  to  the  stretch  of  woods 
of  which  it  is  still  the  central  line.  Such  was  the  place  which  he 
made  it  the  too  great  delight  of  the  remainder  of  his  life  to  increase 
and  beautify,  by  spending  on  it  a  good  deal  more  than  he  had 
earned,  and  that  too  in  times  when  he  should  have  earned  a  good 
deal  more  than  he  ought  to  have  thought  even  for  a  moment  of 
spending.  The  cottage  grew  to  a  mansion,  and  the  mansion  to 
a  castle.  The  farm  by  the  Tweed  made  him  long  for  a  farm  by 
the  Cauldshiel's  loch,  and  the  farm  by  the  Cauldshiel's  loch  for 
Thomas  the  Rhymer's  Glen  ;  and  as,  at  every  step  in  the  ladder, 
his  means  of  buying  were  really  increasing — though  they  were  so 
cruelly  discounted  and  forestalled  by  this  growing  land-hunger, — 
Scott  never  realized  into  what  troubles  he  was  carefully  running 
himself. 

Of  his  life  at  Abbotsford  at  a  later  period  when  his  building 
v/as  greatly  enlarged,  and  his  children  grown  up,  we  have  a  brilliant 
picture  from  the  pen  of  Mr.  Lockhart.  And  though  it  does  not 
belong  to  his  first  year  at  Abbotsford,  I  cannot  do  better  than  in- 
clude it  here  as  conveying  probably  better  than  anything  I  could 
elsewhere  find,  the  charm  of  that  ideal  life  which  lured  Scott  on 
from  one  project  to  another  in  that  scheme  of  castle-building,  in 
relation  to  which  he  confused  so  dangerously  the  world  of  dreams 
with  the  harder  world  of  wages,  capital,  interest,  and  rent. 

"  I  remember  saying  to  William  Allan  one  morning,  as  the  whole  party 
mustered  before  the  porch  after  breakfast, '  A  faithful  sketch  of  what  you 
at  this  moment  see  would  be  more  interesting  a  hundred  years  hence  than 
the  grandest  so-called  historical  picture  that  you  will  ever  exhibit  in  Somer- 
set House ; '  and  my  friend  agreed  with  me  so  cordially  that  I  often 
wondered  afterwards'  he  had  not  attempted  to  realise  the  suggestion.  The 
subject  ought,  however,  to  have  been  treated  conjointly  by  him  (or 
Wilkic)  and  Edwin  Landseer. 

"  It  was  a  clear,  bright  vSeptember  morning,  with  a  sharpness  in  the  air 
that  doubled  the  animating  influence  of  the  sunshine,  and  all  was  in  readi- 


S//!  WALTER  SCOTT. 


57 


ness  for  a  grand  coursing  match  on  Newark  Hill.  The  only  guest  v/ho 
had  chalked  out  other  sports  for  himself  was  the  staunchcst  of  anglers, 
Mr.  Rose  ;  but  he  too  was  there  on  his  s/ielfy,  armed  with  his  salmon-r(j(l 
and  landing-net,  and  attended  by  his  humorous  squire,  Hinves,  and 
Charlie  Purdie,  a  brother  of  Tom,  in  those  days  the  most  celebrated  fisher- 
man of  the  district.  This  little  group  of  Waltonians,  bound  for  Lord 
Somerville's  preserve,  remained  lounging  about  to  witness  the  start  of  the 
main  cavalcade.  Sir  Walter,  mounted  on  Sybil,  was  marshalling  the 
order  of  procession  with  a  huge  hunting-whip ;  and  among  a  dozen  frolic- 
some youths  and  maidens,  who  seemed  disposed  to  laugh  at  all  discipline, 
appeared,  each  on  horseback,  each  as  eager  as  the  youngest  sportsman  ii 
the  troop,  Sir  Humphry  Davy,  Dr.  Wollaston,  and  the  patriarch  of  Scot- 
tish belles  lettres,  Henry  Mackenzie.  The  Man  of  Feeling,  however,  was 
persuaded  with  some  difficulty  to  resign  his  steed  for  the  present  to  his 
faithful  negro  follower,  and  to  join  Lady  Scott  in  the  sociable,  until  we 
should  reach  the  ground  of  our  battue.  Laidlaw,  on  a  long-tailed,  wiry 
Highlander,  yclept  Hoddin  Grey,  which  carried  him  nimbly  and  stoutly, 
although  his  feet  almost  touched  the  ground  as  he  sat,  was  the  adjutant. 
But  the  most  picturesque  figure  was  the  illustrious  inventor  of  the  safety- 
lamp.  He  had  come  for  his  favourite  sport  of  angling,  and  had  been 
practising  it  successfully  with  Rose,  his  travelling-companion,  for  two  or 
three  days  preceding  this,  but  he  had  not  prepared  for  coursing  fields,  and 
had  left  Charlie  Purdie's  troop  for  Sir  Walter's  on  a  sudden  thought ;  and 
his  fisherman's  costume — a  brown  hat  with  flexible  brim,  surrounded  with 
line  upon  line,  and  innumerable  fly-hooks,  jack-boots  worthy  of  a  Dutch 
smuggler,  and  a  fustian  surtout  dabbled  with  the  blood  of  salmon, — made 
a  fine  contrast  with  the  smart  jackets,  white  cord  breeches,  and  well-pol- 
ished jockey-boots  of  the  less  distinguished  cavaliers  about  him.  Dr. 
Wollaston  was  in  black,  and,  vv^ith  his  noble,  serene  dignity  of  countenance, 
might  have  passed  for  a  sporting  archbishop.  Mr.  Mackenzie,  at  this 
time  in  the  seventy-sixth  year  of  his  age,  with  a  white  hat  turned  up  with 
green,  green  spectacles,  green  jacket,  and  long  brown  leather  gaiters 
buttoned  upon  his  nether  anatomy,  wore  a  dog-whistle  round  his  neck,  and 
had  all  over  the  air  of  as  resolute  a  devotee  as  the  gay  captain  of  Huntly 
Burn.  Tom  Purdie  and  his  subalterns  had  preceded  us  by  a  few  hours 
with  all  the  greyhounds  that  could  be  collected  at  Abbotsford,  Darnick, 
and  Melrose  ;  but  the  giant  Maida  had  remained  as  his  master's  orderly, 
and  now  gambolled  about  Sibyl  Grey,  barking  for  mere  joy,  like  a  spaniel 
puppy. 

*'  The  order  of  march  had  been  all  settled,  and  the  sociable  was  just 
getting  under  weigh,  when  the  Lady  Anne  broke  from  the  line,  screaming 
with  laughter,  and  exclaimed,  *  Papa!  papa!  I  know  you  could  never  think 
of  going  without  your  pet*  Scott  looked  round,  and  I  rather  think  there 
was  a  blush  as  well  as  a  smile  upon  his  face,  when  he  perceived  a  little 
black  pig  frisking  about  his  pony,  and  evidently  a  self-elected  addition  to 
the  party  of  the  day,  He  tried  to  look  stern,  and  cracked  his  whip  at  the 
creature,  but  was  in  a  moment  obliged  to  join  in  the  general  cheers.  Poor 
piggy  soon  found  a  strap  round  his  neck,  and  was  dragged  into  the  back- 
ground. Scott,  watching  the  retreat,  repeated  with  mock  pathos  the  first 
verse  of  an  old  pastoral  song  : — 

"  What  will  I  do  gin  my  hoggie  die  ? 
My  joy,  my  pride,  my  hoggie  ! 
My  only  beast,  I  had  nae  mae, 
And  wow  I  but  I  was  vogie  1  ^' 


S//^  WALTER  SCOTT. 


The  cheers  were  redoubled,  and  the  squadron  moved  on.  This  pig  had 
taken,  nobody  could  tell  how,  a  most  sentimental  attachment  to  Scott,  and 
was  constantly  urging  its  pretension  to  be  admitted  a  regular  member  of 
his  tail,  along  with  the  greyhounds  and  terriers:  but  indeed  I  remember 
him  suffering  another  summer  under  the  same  sort  of  pertinacity  on  the 
part  of  an  affectionate  hen.  I  leave  the  explanation  for  philosophers ;  but 
such  were  the  facts.  I  have  too  much  respect  for  the  vulgarly  calumni- 
ated donkey  to  name  him  in  the  same  category  of  pets  with  the  pig  and 
the  hen ;  but  a  year  or  two  after  this  time,  my  wife  used  to  drive  a  couple 
of  these  animals  in  a  little  garden  chair,  and  whenever  her  father  appeared 
at  the  door  of  our  cottage,  we  were  sure  to  see  Hannah  More  and  Lady 
Morgan  (as  Anne  Scott  had  wickedly  christened  them)  trotting  from  their 
pasture  to  lay  their  noses  over  the  paling,  and,  as  V/ ashington  Irving  says 
of  the  old  white-haired  hedger  with  the  Parisian  snuff-box,  *  to  have  a 
pleasant  crack  wi'  the  laird.'  "  * 

Carlyle,  in  his  criticism  on  Scott — a  criticism  which  will  hardly, 
I  think,  stand  the  test  of  criticism  in  its  turn,  so  greatly  does  he 
overdo  the  reaction  against  the  first  excessive  appreciation  of  his 
genius — adds  a  contribution  of  his  own  to  this  charming  idyll,  in 
reference  to  the  natural  fascination  which  Scott  seemed  to  exert 
over  almost  all  dumb  creatures.  A  little  Blenheim  cocker,  one 
of  the  smallest,  beautifullest,  and  tiniest  of  lapdogs,"  with  which 
Carlyle  was  well  acquainted,  and  which  was  also  one  of  the  shyest 
of  dogs,  that  would  crouch  towards  his  mistress  and  draw  back 
"  with  angry  timidity  "  if  any  one  did  but  look  at  him  admiringly, 
once  met  in  the  street  "a  tall,  singular,  busy-looking  man,"  who 
halted  by.  The  dog  ran  towards  him  and  began  "  fawning,  frisking, 
licking  at  his  feet ;  "  and  every  time  he  saw  Sir  Walter  afterwards, 
in  Edinburgh,  he  repeated  his  demonstration  of  delight.  Thus  dis- 
criminating was  this  fastidious  Blenheim  cocker  even  in  the  busy 
.streets  of  Edinburgh. 

And  Scott's  attraction  for  dumb  animals  w^as  only  a  lesser  form 
of  his  attraction  for  all  who  were  in  any  way  dependent  on  him, 
especially  his  own  servants  and  labourers.  The  story  of  his  de- 
meanour towards  them  is  one  of  the  most  touching  ever  written. 

Sir  Walter  speaks  to  every  man  as  if  they  were  blood-relations" 
was  the  common  formula  in  which  this  demeanour  was  described. 
Take  this  illustration.  There  was  a  little  hunchbacked  tailor, 
named  William  Goodfellow,  living  on  his  property  (but  who  at  Ab- 
botsford  was  termed  Robin  Goodfellow).  This  tailor  was  employed 
to  make  the  curtains  for  the  new  library,  and  had  been  very  proud 
of  his  work,  but  fell  ill  soon  afterwards,  and  Sir  Walter  was 
unremitting  in  his  attention  to  him.  ^'  I  can  never  forget,"  says 
Mr.  Lockhart,  ^'the  evening  on  which  the  poor  tailor  died.  When 
Scott  entered  the  hovel,  he  found  everything  silent,  and  inferred 
from  the  looks  of  the  good  woman  in  attendance  that  the  patient 
had  fallen  asleep,  and  that  they  feared  his  sleep  was  the  final  one. 
He  murmured  some  syllables  of  kind  regret :  at  the  sound  of  his 
voice  tlie  dying  tailor  unclosed  his  eyes,  and  eagerly  and  wistfully 

*  Lockhart's  Li/e  of  Scottf  vi«  238-242* 


Sl/a  WAL7ER  SCOTT. 


59 


sat  up,  clasping  his  hands  with  an  expression  of  rapturous  grate- 
fulness and  devotion  that,  in  the  midst  of  deformity,  disease,  pain, 
and  wretchedness,  was  at  once  beautiful  and  sublime.  He  cried 
with  a  loud  voice,  '  The  Lord  bless  and  reward  you  !  '  and  expired 
with  the  effort."  *  Still  more  striking  is  the  account  of  his  relation 
with  Tom  Purdie,  the  wide-mouthed,  under-sized,  broad-shouldered, 
square-made,  thin-flanked  woodsman,  so  well  known  afterwards  by 
all  Scott^s  friends  as  he  waited  for  his  master  in  his  green  shoot- 
ing-jacket, white  hat,  and  drab  trousers.  Scott  first  made  Tom 
Purdie's  acquaintance  in  his  capacity  as  judge,  the  man  being  brought 
before  him  for  poaching,  at  the  time  that  Scott  was  living  at 
Ashestiel.  Tom  gave  so  touching  an  account  of  his  circumstances 
—work  scarce — wife  and  children  in  want — grouse  abundant — and 
his  account  of  himself  was  so  fresh  and  even  humorous,  that  Scott 
let  him  off  the  penalty,  and  made  him  his  shepherd.  He  discharged 
these  duties  so  faithfully  that  he  came  to  be  his  master's  forester 
and  factotum,  and  indeed  one  of  his  best  friends,  though  a  little 
disposed  to  tyrannise  over  Scott  in  his  own  fashion.  A  visitor 
describes  him  as  unpacking  a  box  of  new  importations  for  his 
master  "  as  if  he  had  been  sorting  some  toys  for  a  restless  child." 
But  after  Sir  Walter  had  lost  the  bodily  strength  requisite  for 
riding,  and  was  too  melancholy  for  ordinary  conversation,  Tom 
Purdie's  shoulder  was  his  great  stay  in  wandering  through  his 
woods,  for  with  him  he  felt  that  he  might  either  speak  or  be 
silent  at  his  pleasure.  "What  a  blessing  there  is,"  Scott  wrote 
in  his  diary  at  that  time,  "  in  a  fellow  like  Tom,  whom  no  famiharity 
can  spoil,  whom  you  may  scold  and  praise  and  joke  with,  knowing 
the  quality  of  the  man  is  unalterable  in  his  love  and  reverence  to 
his  master."  After  Scott's  failure,  Mr.  Lockhart  writes  :  "  Before 
I  leave  this  period,  I  must  note  how  greatly  I  admired  the  manner 
in  which  all  his  dependents  appeared  to  have  met  the  reverse  of 
bis  fortunes — a  reverse  which  inferred  very  considerable  alteration 
in  the  circumstances  of  every  one  of  them.  The  butler,  instead  of 
being  the  easy  chief  of  a  large  establishment,  was  now  doing  half 
the  work  of  the  house  at  probably  half  his  former  wages.  Old 
Peter,  who  had  been  for  five  and  twenty  years  a  dignified  coach- 
man, was  now  ploughman  in  ordinary,  only  putting  his  horses  to 
the  carriage  upon  high  and  rare  occasions ;  and  so  on  with  all  the 
rest  that  remained  of  the  ancient  train.  And  all,  to  my  view, 
seemed  happier  than  they  had  ever  done  before."  f  The  illustration 
of  this  true  confidence  between  Scott  and  his  servants  and  labourers 
might  be  extended  to  almost  any  length. 


*  Lockhart's  Life  of  Scott^  vii.  218. 


t  Lockhart's  Life  of  Scott^  ix.  17a 


6o  SI  A'  IV A  ITER  SCOTT. 


CHAPTER  IX. 
SCOTT'S  PARTNERSHIPS  WITH  THE  BALLANTYNES. 

Before  I  make  mention  of  Scott's  greatest  works,  his  novels, 
I  must  say  a  few  words  of  his  relation  to  the  Ballantyne  Brothers, 
who  involved  him,  and  were  involved  by  him,  in  so  many  troubles, 
and  with  whose  name  the  story  of  his  broken  fortunes  is  inextric- 
ably bound  up.  James  Ballantyne,  the  elder  brother,  was  a  school- 
fellow of  Scott's  at  Kelso,  and  was  the  editor  and  manager  of  the 
Kelso  Mail^  an  anti-democratic  journal,  which  had  a  fair  circulation. 
Ballantyne  was  something  of  an  artist  as  regarded  "type,"  and 
Scott  got  him  therefore  to  print  his  Minstrelsy  of  the  Border^  the 
excellent  workmanship  of  which  attracted  much  attention  in  Lon- 
don. In  1802,  on  Scott's  suggestion,  Ballantyne  moved  to  Edin- 
burgh ;  and  to  help  him  to  move,  Scott,  who  was  already  meditating 
some  investment  of  his  little  capital  in  business  other  than  literary, 
lent  him  500/.  Between  this  and  1805,  when  Scott  first  became  a 
partner  of  Ballantyne's  in  the  printing  business,  he  used  every 
exertion  to  get  legal  and  literary  printing  offered  to  James  Ballan- 
tyne, and,  according  to  Mr.  Lockhart,  the  concern  "grew  and 
prospered."  At  Whitsuntide,  1805,  when  The  Lay  had  been 
published,  but  before  Scott  had  the  least  idea  of  the  prospects  of 
gain  which  mere  literature  would  open  to  him,  he  formally,  though 
secretly,  joined  Ballantyne  as  a  partner  in  the  printing  business. 
He  explains  his  motives  for  this  step,  so  far  at  least  as  he  then  re- 
called them,  in  a  letter  written  after  his  misfortunes,  in  1826.  "It 
is  easy,"  he  said,  "  no  doubt  for  any  friend  to  blame  me  for  entering 
into  connexion  with  commercial  matters  at  all.  But  I  wish  to  know 
what  I  could  have  done  better — excluded  from  the  bar,  and  then 
from  all  profits  for  six  years,  by  my  colleague's  prolonged  life. 
Literature  was  not  in  those  days  what  poor  Constable  has  made  it ; 
and  with  my  little  capital  I  was  too  glad  to  make  commercially  the 
means  of  supporting  my  family.  I  got  but  600/.  for  The  Lay  of  the 
Last  Minstrel^  and — it  was  a  price  that  made  men's  hair  stand  on 
end — 1000/.  for  Marmion,  I  have  been  far  from  suffering  by 
James  Ballantyne.  I  owe  it  to  him  to  say,  that  his  difficulties,  as 
well  as  his  advantages,  are  owing  to  me." 

This,  though  a  true,  was  probably  a  very  imperfect  account  of 
Scott's  motives.  He  ceased  practising  at  the  bar,  I  do  not  doubt, 
in  great  degree  from  a  kind  of  hurt  pride  at  his  ill-success,  at  d 


S//^  WALTER  SCOTT. 


61 


time  when  he  felt  during  every  month  more  and  more  confidence 
in  his  own  powers.  He  believed,  with  some  justice,  that  he 
understood  some  of  the  secrets  of  popularity  in  literature,  but  he 
had  always,  till  towards  the  end  of  his  life,  the  greatest  horror  of 
resting  on  literature  alone  as  his  main  resource ;  and  he  was  not  a 
man,  nor  was  Lady  Scott  a  woman,  to  pinch  and  live  narrowly. 
Were  it  only  for  his  lavish  generosity,  that  kind  of  life  would  have 
been  intolerable  to  him.  Hence,  he  reflected,  that  if  he  could  but 
use  his  literary  instinct  to  feed  some  commercial  undertaking, 
managed  by  a  man  he  could  trust,  he  might  gain  a  considerable 
percentage  on  his  little  capital,  without  so  embarking  in  commerce 
as  to  oblige  him  either  to  give  up  his  status  as  a  sheriff,  or  his 
official  duties  as  a  clerk  of  session,  or  his  literary  undertakings. 
In  his  old  schoolfellow,  James  Ballantyne,  he  believed  he  had 
found  just  such  an  agent  as  he  wanted,  the  requisite  link  between 
literary  genius  like  his  own,  and  the  world  which  reads  and  buys 
books  :  and  he  thought  that,  by  feeling  his  way  a  little,  he  might 
secure,  through  this  partnership,  besides  the  then  very  bare  reward 
of  authorship,  at  least  a  share  in  those  more  liberal  rewards  which 
commercial  men  managed  to  squeeze  for  themselves  out  of  success- 
ful authors.  And,  further,  he  felt — and  this  was  probably  the 
greatest  unconscious  attraction  for  him  in  this  scheme — that  with 
James  Ballantyne  for  his  partner  he  should  be  the  real  leader  and 
chief,  and  rather  in  the  position  of  a  patron  and  benefactor  of  his 
colleague,  than  of  one  in  any  degree  dependent  on  the  generosity 
or  approval  of  others.  If  I  have  a  very  strong  passion  in  the 
world, he  once  wrote  of  himself — and  the  whole  story  of  his  life 
seems  to  confirm  it — "it  is  pride."  *  In  James  Ballantyne  he  had 
a  faithful,  but  almost  humble  friend,  with  whom  he  could  deal  much 
as  he  chose,  and  fear  no  wound  to  his  pride.  He  had  himself 
helped  Ballantyne  to  a  higher  line  of  business  than  any  hitherto 
aspired  to  by  him.  It  was  his  own  book  which  first  got  the  Bal- 
lantyne press  its  public  credit.  And  if  he  could  but  create  a  great 
commercial  success  upon  this  foundation,  he  felt  that  he  should 
be  fairly  entitled  to  share  in  the  gains,  which  not  merely  his  loan 
of  capital,  but  his  foresight  and  courage  had  opened  to  Ballan- 
tyne. 

And  it  is  quite  possible  that  Scott  might  have  succeeded — or  at 
all  events  not  seriously  failed — if  he  had  been  content  to  stick  to 
the  printing  firm  of  James  Ballantyne  and  Co.,  and  had  not 
launched  also  into  the  bookselling  and  publishing  firm  of  John 
Ballantyne  and  Co.,  or  had  never  begun  the  wild  and  dangerous 
practice  of  forestalling  his  gains,  and  spending  wealth  which  he 
had  not  earned.  But  when  by  way  of  feeding  the  printing  press  of 
James  Ballantyne  and  Co.,  he  started  in  1809  the  bookselling  and 
publishing  firm  of  John  Ballantyne  and  Co.,  using  as  his  agent  a 
man  as  inferior  in  sterling  worth  to  James,  as  James  was  inferior 
in  general  ability  to  himself,  he  carefully  dug  a  mine  under  his  own 


*  Lockhart's  Life  of  Scott,  viii.  221. 


62 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


feet,  of  which  we  can  only  say,  that  nothing  except  his  genius  could 
have  prevented  it  from  exploding  long  before  it  did.  The  truth 
was  evidently  that  James  Ballantyne's  respectful  homage,  and 
John's  humorous  appreciation,  all  but  blinded  Scott's  eyes  to  the 
utter  inadequacy  of  either  of  these  men,  especially  the  latter,  to 
supply  the  deficiencies  of  his  own  character  for  conducting  business 
of  this  kind  with  proper  discretion.  James  Ballantyne,  who  was 
pompous  and  indolent,  though  thoroughly  honest,  and  not  without 
some  intellectual  insight,  Scott  used  to  call  Aldiborontiphosco- 
phornio.  John,  w^ho  was  clever  but  frivolous,  dissipated,  and  tricksy, 
he  termed  Rigdumfunnidos,  or  his  ''little  Picaroon."  It  is  clear  from 
Mr.  Lockhart's  account  of  the  latter  that  Scott  not  only  did  not 
respect,  but  despised  him,  though  he  cordially  liked  him, and  that  he 
passed  over,  in  judging  him,vices  which  in  brother  or  son  of  his  own 
he  would  severely  have  rebuked.  I  believe  myself  that  his  liking  for 
co-operation  with  both,  was  greatly  founded  on  his  feeling  that  they 
were  simply  creatures  of  his,  to  Vv^hom  he  could  pretty  well  dictate 
what  he  wanted, — colleagues  whose  inferiority  to  himself  unconsci- 
ously flattered  his  pride.  He  was  evidently  inclined  to  resent  bitterly 
the  patronage  of  publishers.  He  sent  word  to  Blackwood  once 
with  great  hauteur,  after  some  suggestion  fromi  that  house  had 
been  made  to  him  which  appeared  to  him  to  interfere  with  his 
independence  as  an  author,  that  he  was  one  of  "  the  Black  Hussars  " 
of  literature,  who  would  not  endure  that  sort  of  treatment.  Con- 
stable, who  was  really  very  liberal,  hurt  his  sensitive  pride  through 
the  Edinburgh  Review^  of  which  Jeffrey  was  editor.  Thus  the 
Ballantynes'  great  deficiency — that  neither  of  them  had  any  inde- 
pendent capacity  for  the  publishing  business,  which  would  in  any 
way  hamper  his  discretion — though  this  is  just  what  commercial 
partners  ought  to  have  had,  or  they  were  not  worth  their  salt, — 
was,  I  believe,  precisely  what  induced  this  Black  Hussar  of  liter- 
ature, in  spite  of  his  otherwise  considerable  sagacity  and  knowledge 
of  human  nature,  to  select  them  for  partners. 

And  yet  it  is  strange  that  he  not  only  chose  them,  but  chose 
the  inferior  and  lighter-headed  of  the  two  for  far  the  most  im- 
portant and  difficult  of  the  two  businesses.  In  the  printing  con- 
cern there  was  at  least  this  to  be  said,  that  of  part  of  the  business 
— the  selection  of  type  and  the  superintendence  of  the  executive 
part, — James  Ballantyne  was  a  good  judge.  He  was  never  appar- 
ently a  good  man  of  business,  for  he  kept  no  strong  hand  over  the 
expenditure  and  accounts,  which  is  the  core  of  success  in  every  con- 
cern. But  he  understood  types  ;  and  his  customers  were  pubhshers, 
a  wealthy  and  judicious  class,  who  were  not  likely  all  to  fail 
together.  But  to  select  a  "  Rigdumfunnidos," — a  dissipated 
comic-song  singer  and  horse-fancier, — for  the  head  of  a  publishing 
concern,  was  indeed  a  kind  of  insanity.  It  is  told  of  John  Ballan- 
tyne, that  after  the  successful  negotiation  with  Constable  for  Rob 
Roy,  and  while  "hopping  up  and  down  in  his  glee,"  he  exclaimed, 
"  '  Is  Rob's  gun  here,  Mr.  Scott  ?  Would  you  object  to  my  trying 
the  old  barrel  with  a  few  de  joy  ?  '    '  Nay,  Mr.  Puff,'  said  Scott, 


SlJi  WALTER  SCOTT. 


63 


Mt  would  burst  and  blow  you  to  the  devil  before  your  time.' 
*  Johnny,  my  man,'  said  Constable,  ^what  the  mischief  puts  draw- 
ing at  sight  into  your  head  ? '  Scott  laughed  heartily  at  this 
innuendo  ;  and  then  observing  that  the  little  man  felt  somewhat 
sore,  called  attention  to  the  notes  of  a  bird  in  the  adjoining  shrul> 
bery.  *  And  by-the-bye,'  said  he,  as  they  continued  listening,  '  'tis 
a  long  time,  Johnny,  since  we  have  had  "The  Cobbler  of  Kelso."  * 
Mr.  Puff  forthwith  jumped  up  on  a  mass  of  stone,  and  seating 
himself  in  the  proper  attitude  of  one  working  with  an  awl,  began  a 
favourite  interlude,  mimicking  a  certain  son  of  Crispin,  at  whose 
stall  Scott  and  he  had  often  lingered  when  they  were  schoolboys, 
and  a  blackbird,  the  only  companion  of  his  cell,  that  used  to  sing 
to  him  while  he  talked  and  whistled  to  it  all  day  long.  With  this 
performance  Scott  was  always  delighted.  Nothing  could  be  richer 
than  the  contrast  of  the  bird's  wild,  sweet  notes,  some  of  which  he 
imitated  with  wonderful  skill,  and  the  accompaniment  of  the  cob- 
bler's hoarse,  cracked  voice,  uttering  all  manner  of  endearing 
epithets,  which  Johnny  multiplied  and  varied  in  a  style  worthy  of 
the  old  women  in  Rabelais  at  the  birth  of  Pantagruel.  "  *  That 
passage  gives  precisely  the  kind  of  estimation  in  which  John  Bal- 
lantyne  was  held  both  by  Scott  and  Constable.  And  yet  it  was  to 
him  that  Scott  entrusted  the  dangerous  and  difficult  duty  of  setting 
up  a  new  publishing  house  as  a  rival  to  the  best  publishers  of  the 
day.  No  doubt  Scott  really  relied  on  his  own  judgment  for  work- 
ing the  pubhshing  house.  But  except  where  his  own  books  were 
concerned,  no  judgment  could  have  been  worse.  In  the  first  place 
he  was  always  wanting  to  do  literary  jobs  for  a  friend,  and  so 
advised  the  publishing  of  all  sorts  of  unsaleable  books,  because 
his  friends  desired  to  write  them.  In  the  next  place,  he  was  a 
genuine  historian,  and  one  of  the  antiquarian  kind  himself ;  he  was 
himself  really  interested  in  all  sorts  of  historical  and  antiquarian 
issues, — and  very  mistakenly  gave  the  public  credit  for  wishing  to 
know  what  he  himself  wished  to  know.  I  should  add  that  Scott's 
good  nature  and  kindness  of  heart  not  only  led  him  to  help  on 
many  books  which  he  knew  in  himself  could  never  answer,  and 
some  which,  as  he  well  knew,  would  be  altogether  worthless,  but 
that  it  greatly  biassed  his  own  intellectual  judgment.  Nothing 
can  be  plainer  than  that  he  really  held  his  intimate  friend,  Joanna 
Baillie,  a  very  great  dramatic  poet,  a  much  greater  poet  than  him- 
self, for  instance  ;  one  fit  to  be  even  mentioned  as  following — at  a 
distance — in  the  track  of  Shakespeare.  He  supposes  Erskine  to 
exhort  him  thus  : — 

"  Or,  if  to  touch  such  chord  be  thine, 
Restore  the  ancient  tragic  line. 
And  emulate  the  notes  that  rung 
From  the  wild  harp  wliich  silent  hung 
By  silver  Avon's  holy  shore, 
Till  twice  a  hundred  years  roll'd  o'er, — 


*  Lockhart*s  Life  of  Scott,  v.  21S. 


64 


S//!  WALTER  SCOTT, 


"When  she,  the  bold  enchantress,  came 
With  fearless  hand  and  heart  on  flame, 
From  the  pale  willow  snatch'd  the  treasure, 
And  swept  it  with  a  kindred  measm-e, 
Till  Avon's  swans,  while  rung  the  grove 
With  Montfort's  hate  and  Basil's  love, 
Awakening  at  the  inspired  strain, 
Deem'd  their  own  Shakespeare  lived  again. 

Avon's  swans  must  have  been  Avon's  geese,  I  think,  if  they 
h\d  deemed  anything  of  the  kind.  Joanna  Baillie's  dramas  are 
"  nice,"  and  rather  dull ;  now  and  then  she  can  write  a  song  with 
the  ease  and  sweetness  that  suggest  Shakespearian  echoes.  But 
Scott's  judgment  was  obviously  blinded  by  his  just  and  warm  re- 
gard for  Joanna  Baillie  herself. 

Of  course  with  such  interfering  causes  to  bring  unsaleable 
books  to  the  house — of  course  I  do  not  mean  that  John  Ballantyne 
and  Co.  published  for  Joanna  Baillie,  or  that  they  would  have  lost 
by  it  if  they  had — the  new  firm  published  all  sorts  of  books  which 
did  not  sell  at  all ;  wdiile  John  Ballantyne  himself  indulged  in  a 
great  many  expenses  and  dissipations,  for  which  John  Ballantyne 
and  Co.  had  to  pay.  Nor  was  it  very  easy  for  a  partner  who  him- 
self drew  bills  on  the  future — even  though  he  were  the  well-spring 
of  all  the  paying  business  the  company  had — to  be  very  severe  on 
,a  fellow-partner  who  supplied  his  pecuniary  needs  in  the  same  way. 
At  all  events,  there  is  no  question  that  all  through  1813  and  1814 
Scott  v/as  kept  in  constant  suspense  and  fear  of  bankruptcy,  by 
the  ill-success  of  John  Ballantyne  and  Co.,  and  the  utter  want  of 
straightforwardness  in  John  Ballantyne  himself  as  to  the  bills  out, 
and  which  had  to  be  provided  against.  It  was  the  publication  of 
IVaverley,  and  the  consequent  opening  up  of  the  richest  vein  not 
only  in  Scott's  own  genius,  but  in  his  popularity  with  the  public, 
which  alone  ended  these  alarms  ;  and  the  many  unsaleable  works  of 
John  Ballantyne  and  Co.  were  then  gradually  disposed  of  to  Con- 
stable and  others,  to  their  own  great  loss,  as  part  of  the  conditions 
on  which  they  received  a  share  in  the  copyright  of  the  wonderful 
novels  which  sold  like  wildfire.  But  though  in  this  way  the 
publishing  business  of  John  Ballantyne  and  Co.  was  saved,  and  its 
affairs  pretty  decently  wound  up,  the  printing  firm  remained  sad- 
dled with  some  of  their  obligations  ;  while  Constable's  business,  on 
which  Scott  depended  for  the  means  with  which  he  was  buying  his 
estate,  building  Ins  castle,  and  settling  money  on  his  daughter- 
in-law,  was  seriously  injured  by  the  purchase  of  all  this  unsaleable 
stock. 

I  do  not  think  that  any  one  who  looks  into  the  complicated  con- 
troversy between  the  representatives  of  the  Ballantynes  and  Mr. 
Lockhart,  concerning  these  matters,  can  be  content  with  Mr. 
Lockhart's — no  doubt  perfectly  sincere — judgment  on  the  case.  It 
is  obvious  that  amidst  these  intricate  accounts,  he  fell  into  one  or 
iwo  serious  blunders — blunders  very  unjust  to  James  Ballantyne. 
And  without  pretending  to  have  myself  formed  any  minute  judg- 


S/R  WALTER  SCOTT. 


6S 


ment  on  the  details,  I  think  the  following  points  clear: — (i.)  That 
James  Ballantyne  was  very  severely  judged  by  Mr.  Lockhart,  on 
grounds  which  were  never  alleged  by  Scott  against  him  at  all, — 
indeed  on  grounds  on  which  he  was  expressly  exempted  from  all 
blame  by  Sir  Walter.  (2.)  That  Sir  Walter  Scott  was  very 
severely  judged  by  the  representatives  of  the  Ballantynes,  on 
grounds  on  which  James  Ballantyne  himself  never  brought  any 
charge  against  him  ;  on  the  contrary,  he  declared  that  he  had  no 
charge  to  bring.  (3)  That  both  Scott  and  his  partners  invited 
ruin  by  freely  spending  gains  which  they  only  expected  to  earn, 
and  that  in  this  Scott  certainly  set  an  example  which  he  could 
hardly  expect  feebler  men  not  to  follow.  On  the  whole,  I  think  the 
troubles  with  the  Ballantyne  brothers  brought  to  light  not  only  that 
eager  gambling  spirit  in  him,  which  his  grandfather  indulged  with 
better  success  and  more  moderation  when  he  bought  the  hunter 
with  money  destined  for  a  flock  of  sheep^  and  then  gave  up  gam* 
bling  for  ever,  but  a  tendency  still  more  dangerous,  and  in  some  re- 
spects involving  an  even  greater  moral  defect, — I  mean  a  tendency, 
chiefly  due,  I  think,  to  a  very  deep-seated  pride, — to  prefer  inferior 
men  as  working  colleagues  in  business  And  yet  it  is  clear  thai  if 
Scott  were  to  dabble  in  publishing  at  all,  he  really  needed  the 
check  of  men  of  larger  experience,  and  less  literary  turn  of  mind. 
The  great  majority  of  consumers  of  popular  literature  are  not,  and 
indeed  will  hardly  ever  be,  literary  men  ;  and  that  is  precisely  why 
a  publisher  who  is  not,  in  the  main,  hterary,—  who  looks  on 
authors'  MSS.  for  the  most  part  with  dist/ ust  and  suspicion,  much 
as  a  rich  man  looks  at  a  begging-letter,  or  a  sober  and  judicious 
fish  at  an  angler's  fly, — is  so  much  less  likely  to  run  aground  than 
such  a  man  as  Scott.  The  untried  author  should  be  regarded  b /  a 
wise  i^ublisher  as  a  natural  enemy, — an  enemy  indeed  of  a  class, 
rare  specimens  whereof  will  always  be  his  best  friends,  and  who, 
therefore,  should  not  be  needlessly  affronted — but  also  as  one  of  a 
class  of  whom  nineteen  out  of  every  twenty  will  dangle  before  the 
publisher's  eyes  wiles  and  hopes  and  expectations  of  the  most 
dangerous  and  illusory  character, — which  constitute  indeed  the 
very  perils  that  it  is  his  true  function  in  life  skilfully  to  evade. 
The  Ballantynes  were  quite  unfit  for  this  function  ;  first,  they  had 
not  the  experience  requisite  for  it ;  next,  they  were  altogether  too 
much  under  Scott's  influence.  No  wonder  that  the  partnership 
came  to  no  good,  and  left  behind  it  the  germs  of  calamity  even 
more  serious  still. 


66 


^IR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


CHAPTER  X. 

THE  WAVERLEY  NOVELS. 

In  the  summer  of  1814,  Scott  took  up  again  and  completed-* 
almost  at  a  single  heat, — a  fragment  of  a  Jacobite  story,  begun  in 
1805  and  then  laid  aside.  It  was  published  anonymously,  and  its 
astonishing  success  turned  back  again  the  scales  of  Scott's  for- 
tunes, already  inclining  ominously  towards  a  catastrophe.  This 
story  was  Waverley,  Mr.  Carlyle  has  praised  Waverley  above 
its  fellows.  "  On  the  whole,  contrasting  Waverley^  which  was 
carefully  written,  with  most  of  its  followers  which  were  written  ex- 
tempore, one  may  regret  the  extempore  method."  This  is,  how- 
ever, a  very  unfortunate  judgment.  Not  one  of  the  whole  series 
of  novels  appears  to  have  been  written  more  completely  extempore 
than  the  great  bulk  of  Waverley,  including  almost  everything  that 
made  it  even  popular  with  the  million  or  fascinating  to  the  fastidi- 
ous ;  and  it  is  even  likely  that  this  is  one  of  the  causes  of  its  excel* 
lence. 

The  last  two  volumes,"  says  Scott,  in  a  letter  to  Mr.  Morritt, 
"  were  written  in  three  weeks."  And  here  is  Mr.  Lockhart's  de- 
scription of  the  effect  which  Scott's  incessant  toil  during  the  com- 
position, produced  on  a  friend  whose  window  happened  to  com- 
mand the  novelist's  study  : — 

"Happening  to  pass  through  Edinburgh  in  June,  1814,  I  dined  one  day 
with  the  gentleman  in  question  (now  the  Honourable  William  Menzies, 
one  of  the  Supreme  Judges  at  the  Cape  of  Good  Hope),  whose  residence 
was  then  in  George  Street,  situated  very  near  to,  and  at  right  angles  with, 
North  Castle  Street.  It  was  a  party  of  very  young  persons,  most  of 
them,  like  Menzies  and  myself,  destined  for  the  J3ar  of  Scotland,  all  gay 
and  thoughtless,  enjoying  the  first  flush  of  manhood,  with  little  remem- 
brance of  the  yesterday,  or  care  of  the  morrow.  When  my  companion's 
worthy  father  land  uncle,  after  seeing  two  or  three  bottles  go  round,  left 
the  juveniles  to  themselves,  the  weather  being  hot,  we  adjourned  to  a 
library  which  had  one  large  window  looking  nortlnvards.  After  carousing 
here  for  an  hour  or  more,  I  observed  that  a  shade  had  come  over  the 
asj)ect  of  my  friend,  who  happened  to  be  placed  immediately  opposite  to 
myself,  and  said  something  that  intimated  a  fear  of  his  being  unwell.  *  No,' 
said  he,  *  I  shall  be  well  enough  presently,  if  you  will  only  let  me  sit  where 
ou  are,  and  take  my  chair;  for  there  is  a  confounded  hand  in  sight  of  me 
ere,  which  has  often  bothered  me  before,  and  now  it  won't  let  me  fill  my 


S/A'  WALTER  SCOTT. 


67 


glass  with  a  good  will.'  I  rose  to  change  places  with  him  accordingly, 
and  he  pointed  out  to  me  this  hand,  which,  like  the  writing  on  Belshazzar's 
wall,  disturbed  his  hour  of  hilarity.  '  Since  we  sat  down,'  he  said,  '  I  have 
been  watching  it — it  fascinates  my  eye — it  never  stops — page  after  page  is 
finished,  and  thrown  on  that  heap  of  MS.,  and  still  it  goes  on  unwearied  ; 
and  so  it  wall  be  till  candles  are  brought  in,  and  God  knows  how  long  after 
that.  It  is  the  same  every  night — I  can't  stand  a  sight  of  it  when  I  am  not 
at  my  books.*  *  Some  stupid,  dogged  engrossing  clerk,  probably/  exclaimed 
myself,  *or  some  other  giddy  youth  in  our  society.'  *  No,  boys/  said  our 
host ;  *  I  well  know  what  hand  it  is — 'tis  Walter  Scott's.'  "  * 

If  that  is  not  extempore  writing,  it  is  difficult  to  say  what  ex- 
tempore writing  is.  But  in  truth  there  is  no  evidence  that  any 
one  of  the  novels  was  laboured,  or  even  so  much  as  carefully 
composed.  Scott's  method  of  composition  was  always  the  same ; 
and,  when  writing  an  imaginative  work,  the  rate  of  progress 
seems  to  have  been  pretty  even,  depending  much  more  on  the 
absence  of  disturbing  engagements,  than  on  any  mental  irregu 
larity.  The  morning  was  always  his  brightest  time ;  but  morning 
or  evening,  in  country  or  in  town,  well  or  ill,  writing  with  his  own 
pen  or  dictating  to  an  amanuensis  in  the  intervals  of  screaming- 
fits  due  to  the  torture  of  cramp  in  the  stomach,  Scott  spun  away  at 
his  imaginative  web  almost  as  evenly  as  a  silkworm  spins  at  its 
golden  cocoon.  Nor  can  1  detect  the  slightest  trace  of  any  differ- 
ence in  quality  between  the  stories,  such  as  can  be  reasonably 
ascribed  to  comparative  care  or  haste.  There  are  differences,  and 
even  great  differences,  of  course,  ascribable  to  the  less  or  greater 
suitability  of  the  subject  chosen  to  Scott's  genius,  but  I  can  find 
no  trace  of  the  sort  of  cause  to  which  Mr.  Carlyle  refers.  Thus, 
few,  I  suppose,  would  hesitate  to  say  that  while^  Old  Mortality  is 
very  near,  if  not  quite,  the  finest  of  Scott's  works,  The  Black  Dwarf 
is  not  far  from  the  other  end  of  the  scale-  Yet  the  two  w^ere 
written  in  immediate  succession  [The  Black  Dwarf  h^mg  the  first 
of  the  two),  and  v/ere  published  together,  as  the  first  series  of  Tales 
of7ny  Landlord,  in  1816.  Nor  do"l  think  that  any  competent  critic 
would  find  any  clear  deterioration  of  quality  in  the  novels  of  the 
later  years, — excepting  of  course  the  two  written  after  the  stroke 
of  paralysis.  It  is  true,  of  course,  that  some  of  the  subjects  which 
most  powerfully  stirred  his  imagination  were  among  his  earlier 
themes,  and  that  he  could  not  effectually  use  the  same  subject 
twice,  though  he  now  and  then  tried  it.  But  making  allowance 
for  this  consideration,  the  imaginative  power  of  the  novels  is  as 
astonishingly  eve7t  as  the  rate  of  composition  itself.  For  my  own 
part,  I  greatly  prefer  The  Fortunes  of  Nigel  {:s\\-\\q\\  was  written  in 
1822)  to  Waverley  which  was  begun  in  1805,  and  finished  in  1814, 
and  though  very  many  better  critics  would  probably  decidedly  dis- 
agree, I  do  not  think  that  any  of  them  would  consider  this  prefer- 
ence grotesque  or  purely  capricious.  Indeed,  though  A7ine  of 
Geierstein^—ihe  last  composed  before  Scott's  stroke,— would  hardly 
seem  to  any  careful  judge  the  equal  of  Waverley,  I  do  not  much 

*  Lockh art's  Life  of  Scott ^  \\\  171-3. 


68 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


doubt  that  if  it  had  appeared  in  place  of  Waverley^  it  would  have 
excited  very  nearly  as  much  interest  and  admiration  ;  nor  that  had 
Waver  ley  appeared  in  1829,  in  place  of  Anne  of  Geierstein,  it 
would  have  failed  to  excite  very  much  more.  In  these  fourteen 
most  effective  years  of  Scott's  literary  life,  during  which  he  wrote 
twenty-three  novels  besides  shorter  tales,  the  best  stories  appear 
to  have  been  on  the  whole  the  most  rapidly  written,  probably  be- 
cause  they  took  the  strongest  hold  of  the  author's  imagination. 

Till  near  the  close  of  his  career  as  an  author,  Scott  never 
avowed  his  responsibility  for  any  of  these  series  of  novels,  and 
even  took  some  pains  to  mystify  the  public  as  to  the  identity  be- 
tween the  author  of  Waverley  and  the  author  of  Tales  of  my 
Landlord.  The  care  with  which  the  secret  was  kept  is  imputed  by 
Mr.  Lockhart  in  some  degree  to  the  habit  of  mystery  which  had 
grown  upon  Scott  during  his  secret  partnership  with  the  Ballan- 
tynes  ;  but  in  this  he  seems  to  be  confounding  two  very  different 
phases  of  Scott's  character.  No  doubt  he  was,  as  a  professional 
man,  a  little  ashamed  of  his  commercial  speculation,  and  unwilling 
to  betray  it.  But  he  was  far  from  ashamed  of  his  literary  enter- 
prise, though  it  seems  that  he  was  at  first  very  anxious  lest  a  com- 
parative failure,  or  even  a  mere  moderate  success,  in  a  less  ambi- 
tious sphere  than  that  of  poetry,  should  endanger  the  great  reputa- 
tion he  had  gained  as  a  poet.  That  was  apparently  the  first  reason 
for  secrecy.  But,  over  and  above  this,  it  is  clear  that  the  mystery 
stimulated  Scott's  imagination  and  saved  him  trouble  as  well.  He 
was  obviously  more  free  under  the  veil — free  from  the  liability  of 
having  to  answer  for  the  views  of  life  or  history  suggested  in  his 
stones  ;  but  besides  this,  what  was  of  more  importance  to  him, 
the  slight  disguise  stimulated  his  sense  of  humour,  and  gratified 
the  whimsical,  boyish  pleasure  which  he  always  had  in  acting  an 
imaginary  character.  He  used  to  talk  of  himself  as  a  sort  of  Abon 
Hassan — a  private  man  one  day,  and  acting  the  part  of  a  monarch 
the  next— with  the  kind  of  glee  which  indicated  a  real  delight  in 
the  change  of  parts,  and  I  have  little  doubt  that  he  threw  himself 
with  the  more  gusto  into  characters  very  different  from  his  o\yn,  in 
consequence  of  the  pleasure  it  gave  him  to  conceive  his  friends 
hopelessly  misled  by  this  display  of  traits,  with  which  he  supposed 
that  they  could  not  have  credited  him  even  in  imagination.  Thus 
besides  relieving  him  of  a  host  of  compliments  which  he  did  not 
enjoy,  and  enabling  him  the  better  to  evade  an  ill-bred  curiosity, 
the  disguise  no  doubt  was  the  same  sort  of  fillip  to  the  fancy  which 
a  mask  and  domino  or  a  fancy  dress  are  to  that  of  their  wearers. 
Even  in  a  disguise  a  man  cannot  cease  to  be  himself ;  but  he  can 
get  rid  of  his  improperly  "  imputed  "  righteousness — often  the 
greatest  burden  he  has  to  bear — and  of  all  the  expectations  formed 
on  the  strength,  as  Mr.  Clough  says, — 

Of  having  been  what  one  has  been, 
What  one  thinks  one  is,  or  thinks  tluit  otiiers  suppose  one." 

To  some  men  the  freedom  of  this  disguise  is  a  real  danger  and 


.V/A'  WALTER  SCOTT. 


69 


temptation.  It  never  could  have  been  so  to  Scott,  \vho  was  in  tlie 
main  one  of  the  simplest  as  well  as  the  boldest  and  proudest  of 
men.  And  as  most  men  perhaps  would  admit  that  a  good  deal  of 
even  the  best  part  of  their  nature  is  rather  suppressed  than  ex- 
pressed by  the  name  by  which  they  are  known  in  the  world,  Scott 
must  have  felt  this  in  a  far  higher  degree,  and  probably  regarded 
the  manifold  characters  under  which  he  was  known  to  society,  as 
representing  him  in  some  respects  more  justly  than  any  individual 
name  could  have  done.  His  mind  ranged  hither  and  thither  over 
a  wide  field — far  beyond  that  of  his  actual  experience, — and  prob- 
ably ranged  over  it  all  the  more  easily  for  not  being  absolutely 
tethered  to  a  single  class  of  associations  by  any  public  confession 
of  his  authorship.  After  all,  when  it  became  universally  known 
that  Scott  was  the  only  author  of  all  these  tales,  it  may  be  doubted 
whether  the  public  thought  as  adequately  of  the  imaginative  efforts 
which  had  created  them,  as  they  did  while  they  remained  in  some 
doubt  whether  there  was  a  multiplicity  of  agencies  at  work,  or  only 
one.  The  uncertainty  helped  them  to  realise  the  many  lives  which 
were  really  led  by  the  author  of  all  these  tales,  more  completely 
than  any  confession  of  the  individual  authorship  could  have  done. 
The  shrinking  of  activity  in  public  curiosity  and  wonder  which  fol- 
lows the  final  determination  of  such  ambiguities,  is  very  apt  to  result 
rather  in  a  dwindling  of  the  imaginative  effort  to  enter  into  the 
genius  wliich  gave  rise  to  them,  than  in  an  increase  of  respect  for 
so  manifold  a  creative  pow^r. 

When  Scott  wrote,  such  fertility  as  his  in  the  production  of 
novels  was  regarded  witli  amazement  approaching  to  absolute  in- 
credulity. Yet  he  was  in  this  respect  only  the  advanced-guard  of 
a  not  inconsiderable  class  of  men  and  women  who  have  a  special 
gift  for  pouring  out  story  after  story,  containing  a  great  variety  of 
figures,  while  retaining  a  certain  even  level  of  merit.  There  is 
more  than  one  novelist  of  the  present  day  who  has  far  surpassed 
Scott  in  the  numl^er  of  his  tales,  and  one  at  least  of  very  high 
repute,  who  has,  I  believe,  produced  more  even  within  the  same 
time.  But  though  to  our  larger  experience,  Scott's  achievement, 
in  respect  of  mere  fertility,  is  by  no  means  the  miracle  v/hich  it 
once  seemed,  I  do  not  think  one  of  his  successors  can  compare 
with  him  for  a  moment  in  the  ease  and  truth  with  which  he  painted, 
not  m.erely  the  life  of  his  o\^n\  time  and  country — seldom  indeed 
that  of  precisely  his  own  time — but  that  of  days  long  past,  and  often 
too  of  scenes  far  distant.  The  most  powerful  of  all  his  stories, 
Old  Mortality^  was  the  story  of  a  period  more  than  a  century  and 
a  quarter  before  he  wrote;  and  others, — which  thougli  inferior  to 
this  in  force,  are  nevertheless,  when  compared  with  the  so-called 
historical  romances  of  any  other  English  writer,  what  sunlight  is  to 
moonlight,  if  you  can  say  as  much  for  the  latter  as  to  admit  even 
that  comparison, — go  back  to  the  period  of  the  Tudors,  that  is,  two 
centuries  and  a  half.  Qtcejttin  Durivard,  which  is  all  but  amongst 
the  best,  runs  back  farther  still,  far  into  the  previous  century,  while 
Ivanhoe  and  The  Talisnia^i^  though  not  among  the  greatest  of 


70 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT, 


Scott's  works,  carry  us  back  more  than  five  hundred  years.  Th* 
new  class  of  extempore  novel  writers,  though  more  considerable 
than,  sixty  years  ago,  any  one  could  have  expected  ever  to  see  it, 
is  still  limited,  and  on  any  high  level  of  merit  will  probably  always 
be  limited,  to  the  delineation  of  the  times  of  which  the  narrator 
has  personal  experience.  Scott  seemed  to  have  had  something 
very  like  personal  experience  of  a  few  centuries  at  least,  judging  by 
the  ease  and  freshness  with  which  he  poured  out  his  stories  of 
these  centuries,  and  tliough  no  one  can  pretend  that  even  he  could 
describe  the  period  of  the  Tudors  as  Miss  Austen  described  the 
country  parsons  and  squires  of  George  the  Third's  reign,  or  as 
Mr.  Trollope  describes  the  politicians  and  hunting-men  of  Queen 
Victoria's,  it  is  nevertheless  the  evidence  of  a  greater  imagination 
to  make  us  live  so  famiharly  as  Scott  does  amidst  the  political  and 
religious  controversies  of  two  or  three  centuries'  duration,  to  be 
the  actual  witnesses,  as  it  were,  of  Margaret  of  Anjou's  throes  of 
vain  ambition,  and  Mary  Stuart's  fascinating  remorse,  and  Eliza- 
beth's domineering  and  jealous  balancings  of  noble  against  noble, 
of  James  the  First's  shrewd  pedantries,  and  the  Regent  Murray's 
large  forethought,  of  the  politic  craft  of  Argyle,  the  courtly  ruth- 
lessness  of  Claverhouse,  and  the  high-bred  clemency  of  Monmouth, 
than  to  reflect  in  countless  modifications  the  freaks,  figures,  and 
fashions  of  our  own  time. 

The  most  striking  features  of  Scott's  romances  is  that,  for  the 
most  part,  they  are  pivoted  on  public  rather  than  mere  private  in- 
terests and  passions.  With  but  few  exceptions — {The  Aittiquary^ 
St,  Ro7ian'^s  Well^  and  Guy  Man7iering  are  the  most  important) — 
Scott's  novels  give  us  an  imaginative  view,  not  of  mere  individuals, 
but  of  individuals  as  they  are  affected  by  the  public  strifes  and 
social  divisions  of  the  age.  And  this  it  is  which  gives  his  books 
so  large  an  interest  for  old  and  young,  soldiers  and  statesmen, 
the  world  of  society  and  the  recluse,  alike.  You  can  hardly 
read  any  novel  of  Scott's  and  not  become  better  aware  what  pub- 
lic hfe  and  political  issues  mean.  And  yet  there  is  no  artificiality, 
no  elaborate  attitudinising  before  the  antique  mirrors  of  tlie  past, 
like  Bulwer's,  no  dressing  out  of  clothes-horses  like  G.  P.  R.  James. 
The  boldness  and  freshness  of  the  present  are  carried  back  into  the 
past,  and  you  see  Papists  and  Puritans,  Cavaliers  and  Roundheads, 
Jews,  Jacobites,  and  freebooters,  preachers,  schoolmasters,  merce- 
nary soldiers,  gipsies,  and  beggars,  all  living  the  sort  of  life  which 
the  reader  feels  that  in  their  circumstances  and  under  the  same  con- 
ditions of  time  and  place  and  parentage,  he  might  have  lived  too. 
Indeed,  no  man  can  read  Scott  without  being  more  of  a  public  man, 
whereas  the  ordinary  novel  tends  to  make  its  readers  rather  less  of 
one  than  before. 

Next,  though  most  of  these  stories  are  rightly  called  romances, 
no  one  can  avoid  observing  that  they  give  that  side  of  life  which  is 
unromantic,  quite  as  vigorously  as  the  romantic  side.  This  was 
not  true  of  Scott's  poems,  which  only  expressed  one-half  of  his  na- 
ture, and  were  almost  pure  romances.    But  in  the  novels  the  busi- 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT, 


71 


ness  of  life  is  even  better  pourtrayed  than  its  sentiments.  Mr.  Bag- 
shot,  one  of  the  ablest  of  Scott's  critics,  has  pointed  out  this  ad- 
mirably in  his  essay  on  The  Waverley  Novels.    "  Many  historical 
novelists,"   he  says,  "especially  those  who  with  care  and  pains 
have  read  up  the  detail,  are  often  evidently  in  a  strait  how  to  pass 
from  their  history  to  their  sentiment.    The  fancy  of  Sir  Walter 
could  not  help  connecting  the  two.  Jf  he  had  given  us  the  English 
side  of  the  race  to  Derby,  he  would  have  described  the  Bank  of 
England  ^paying  in  sixpences^  and  also  the  loves  of  the  cashier. 
No  one  who  knows  the  novels  well  can  question  this.  Fergus  Mac- 
Ivor's  ways  and  means,  his  careful  arrangements  for  receiving  sub- 
sidies in  black  mail,  are  as  carefully  recorded  as  his  lavish  highland 
hospitalities;  and  when  he  sends  his  silver  cup  to  the  Gaehc  bard 
who  chaunts  his  greatness,  the  faithful  historian  does  not  forget  to 
let  us  know  that  the  cup  is  his  last,  and  that  he  is  hard  pressed  for 
the  generosities  of  the  future.    So  too  the  habitual  thievishness  of 
the  highlanders  is  pressed  upon  us  quite  as  vividly  as  their  gallantry 
and  superstition.    And  so  careful  is  Sir  Walter  to  paint  the  petty 
pedantries  of  the  Scotch  traditional  conservatism,  that  he  will  not 
spare  even  Charles  Edward — of  whom  he  draws  so  graceful  a  pic- 
ture^ — the  humiliation  of  submitting  to  old  Bradwardine's  "  solemn 
act  of  homage,"  but  makes  him  go  through  the  absurd  ceremony 
of  placing  his  foot  on  a  cushion  to  have  its  brogue  unlatched  by  the 
dry  old  enthusiast  of  heraldic  lore.    Indeed  it  was  because  Scott 
so  much  enjoyed  the  contrast  between  the  high  sentiment  of  life 
and  its  dry  and  often  absurd  detail,  that  his  imagination  found  so 
much  freer  a  vent  in  the  historical  romance,  than  it  ever  found  in 
the  romantic  poem.  Yet  he  clearly  needed  the  romantic  excitement 
of  picturesque  scenes  and  historical  interests,  too.    I  do  not  think 
he  would  ever  have  gained  any  brilliant  success  in  the  narrov/er  re- 
gion of  the  domestic  novel.    He  said  himself,  in  expressing  his  ad- 
miration of  Miss  Austen,      The  big  bow-wow  strain  I  can  do 
myself,  like  any  now  going,  but  the  exquisite  touch  which  renders 
ordinary  commonplace  things  and  characters  interesting,  from  the 
truth  of  the  description  and  the  sentiment,  is  denied  to  me.'*  In- 
deed he  tried  it  to  some  extent  in  St.  Ronan^s  Well,  and  so  far  as  he 
tried  it,  I  think  he  failed.    Scott  needed  a  certain  largeness  of  type, 
a  strongly-marked  class-Hfe,  and,  where  it  was  possible,  a  free,  out- 
of-doors  life,  for  his  delineations.    No  one  could  paint  beggars  and 
gipsies,  and  wandering  fiddlers,  and  mercenary  soldiers,  and  peas- 
ants and  farmers  and  lawyers,  and  magistrates,  and  preachers,  and 
courtiers,  and  statesmen,  and  best  of  all  perhaps  queens  and  kings, 
with  anything  like  his  ability.    But  when  it  came  to  describing  the 
small  differences  of  manner,  differences  not  due  to  external  habits, 
so  much  as  to  internal  sentiment  or  education,  or  mere  domestic 
circumstance,  he  was  beyond  his  proper  field.    In  the  sketch  of 
the  St.  Ronan's  Spa  and  the  company  at  the  table  d'hote,  he  is  of 
course  somewhere  near  the  mark, — he  was  too  able  a  man  to  fall 
far  short  of  success  in  anything  he  really  gave  to  the  world ;  but 
it  is  not  interesting.  Miss  Austen  would  have  made  Lady  Penelope 


72 


S//^  WALTER  SCOTT. 


Penfeatlier  a  hundred  times  as  amusing.  We  turn  to  Meg  Dods  and 
Touchwood,  and  Cargill,  and  Captain  Jekyl,  and  Sir  Bingo  Binks, 
and  to  Clara  Mowbray. — i.  e.  to  the  lives  really  moulded  by  large 
and  specific  causes,  for  enjoyment,  and  leave  the  small  gossip  of  the 
company  at  the  Wells  as,  relatively  at  least,  a  failure.  And  it  is 
well  for  all  the  world  that  it  was  so.  The  domestic  novel,  when 
really  of  the  highest  kind,  is  no  doubt  a  perfect  work  of  art,  and  an 
unfailing  source  of  amusement ;  but  it  has  nothing  of  the  tonic  in- 
fluence, the  large  instructiveness,  the  stimulating  intellectual  air,  of 
Scott's  historic  tales.  Even  when  Scott  is  farthest  from  reality — 
as  in  Ivanhoe  or  The  Monastery — he  makes  you  open  your  eyes  to 
all  sorts  of  historical  conditions  to  which  you  would  otherwise  be 
blind.  The  domestic  novel,  even  v/hen  its  art  is  perfect,  gives  little 
but  pleasure  at  the  best ;  at  the  worst  it  is  simply  scandal  idealized. 

Scott  often  confessed  his  contempt  for  his  own  heroes.  He 
said  of  Edward  Waverley,  for  instance,  that  he  was  "  a  sneaking 
piece  of  imbecility,"  and  that  "  if  he  had  married  Flora,  she  would 
have  set  him  up  upon  the  chimney-piece  as  Count  Borowlaski's 
wife  used  to  do  with  him.  I  am  a  bad  hand  at  depicting  a  hero, 
properly  so  called,  and  have  an  unfortunate  propensity  for  the  du- 
bious characters  of  borderers,  buccaneers,  highland  robbers,  and 
all  others  of  a  Robin-Hood  description."*  In  another  letter  he 
says,  "  My  rogue  always,  in  despite  of  me,  turns  out  my  hero."  \ 
And  it  seems  very  likely  that  in  most  of  the  situations  Scott  de- 
scribes so  well,  his  own  course  would  have  been  that  of  his  wilder 
impulses,  and  not  that  of  his  reason.  Assuredly  he  would  never 
have  stopped  hesitating  on  the  line  between  opposite  courses  as  his 
Waverleys,  his  Mortons,  his  Osbaldistones  do.  Whenever  he  was 
really  involved  in  a  party  strife,  he  flung  prudence  and  impartiahty 
to  the  winds,  and  went  in  Hke  the  hearty  partisan  which  his  strong 
impulses  made  of  him.  But  granting  this,  I  do  not  agree  with  his 
condemnation  of  all  his  own  colourless  heroes.  However  much  they 
differed  in  nature  from  Scott  himself,  the  even  balance  of  their 
reason  against  their  sympathies  is  certainly  well  conceived,  is  in  it- 
self natural,  and  is  an  admirable  expedient  for  effecting  that  which 
was  probably  its  real  use  to  Scott,— the  affording  an  opportunity 
for  the  delineation  of  all  the  pros  and  cons  of  the  case,  so  tliat  tlie 
characters  on  both  sides  of  the  struggle  should  be  properly  under- 
stood. Scott's  imagination  was  clearly  far  wider—was  far  more 
permeated  with  the  fixed  air  of  sound  judgment— than  his  practical 
impulses.  He  needed  a  machinery  for  displaying  his  insight  into 
both  sides  of  a  public  quarrel,  and  his  colourless  heroes  gave  him 
the  instrument  he  needed.  Both  in  Morton's  case  (in  Old  Mortality), 
and  in  Waverley's,  the  hesitation  is  certainly  well  described.  In- 
deed in  relation  to  the  controversy  between  Covenanters  and  Roy- 
alists, virhile  his  political  and  martial  prepossessions  went  with  Cla- 
verhouse,  his  reason  and  educated  moral  feeling  certainly  were 
clearly  identified  with  Morton. 

*  Lockhart's  Life  o/ScoU,  iv.  175-6. 
t  Lockhart's  Lt/e  of  Scott y  ir.  46. 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


73 


It  is,  however,  obviously  true  that  Scott's  heroes  are  mostly 
created  for  the  sake  of  the  facility  they  give  in  delineating  the 
other  characters,  and  not  the  other  characters  for  the  sake  of 
the  heroes.  They  are  the  imaginative  neutral  ground,  as  it  were, 
on  which  opposing  influences  are  brought  to  play  ;  and  what  Scott 
best  loved  to  paint  was  those  who,  whether  by  nature,  by  inher- 
itance, or  by  choice,  had  become  unique  and  characteristic  types  of 
one-sided  feeling,  not  those  who  were  merely  in  process  of  growth, 
and  had  not  ranged  themselves  at  all.  Mr.  Carlyle,  who,  as  I  have 
said  before,  places  Scott's  romances  far  below  their  real  level, 
maintains  that  these  great  types  of  his  are  drawn  from  the  outside, 
and  not  made  actually  to  live.  "His  Bailie  Jarvies,  Dinmonts, 
Dalgettys  (for  their  name  is  legion),  do  look  and  talk  like  what 
they  give  themselves  out  for  ;  they  are.  if  not  created  and  made 
poetically  alive,  yet  deceptively  e7iacted  2iS>  a  good  player  might  do 
them.  What  more  is  wanted,  then  ?  For  the  reader  lying  on  a 
sofa,  nothing  more  ;  yet  for  another  sort  of  reader  much.  It  were 
a  long  chapter  to  unfold  the  difference  in  drawing  a  character  be- 
tween a  Scott  and  a  Shakespeare  or  Goethe.  Yet  it  is  a  difference 
literally  immense  ;  they  are  of  a  different  species  ;  the  value  of  the 
one  is  not  to  be  counted  in  the  coin  of  the  other.  We  might  say 
in  a  short  word,  which  covers  a  long  matter,  that  your  Shakespeare 
fashions  his  characters  from  the  heart  outwards  ;  your  Scott  fash- 
ions them  from  the  skin  inwards,  never  getting  near  the  heart  of 
them.  The  one  set  become  living  men  and  women  ;  the  other 
amount  too  little  more  than  mechanical  cases,  deceptively  painted 
automatons."*  And  then  he  goes  on  to  contrast  Fenella  in 
Peveril  of  the  Peak  with  Goethe's  Mignon.  Mr.  Carlyle  could 
hardly  have  chosen  a  less  fair  comparison.  If  Goethe  is  to  be 
judged  by  his  women,  let  Scott  be  judged  by  his  men.  So  judged, 
I  think  Scott  will,  as  a  painter  of  character — of  course,  I  am  not 
now  speaking  of  him  as  a  poet, — come  out  far  above  Goethe.  Ex- 
cepting the  hero  of  his  first  drama  (Gotz  of  the  iron  hand),  which 
by  the  way  was  so  much  in  Scott's  line  that  his  first  essay  in  poetry 
was  to  translate  it — not  very  well — I  doubt  if  Goethe  was  ever  suc- 
cessful with  his  pictures  of  men.  Wilhelm  Meister  is,  as  Niebuhr 
truly  said,  ^'  a  monagerie  of  tame  animals."  Doubtless  Goethe's 
women — certainly  his  women  of  culture — are  more  truly  and  in- 
wardly conceived  and  created  than  Scott's.  Except  Jeanie  Deans 
and  Madge  Wildfire,  and  perhaps  LucyAshton,  Scott's  women  are 
apt  to  be  uninteresting,  either  pink  and  white  toys,  or  hardish  women 
of  the  world.  But  then  no  one  can  compare  the  men  of  the  two 
writers,  and  not  see  Scott's  vast  pre-eminence  on  that  side. 

I  think  the  deficiency  of  his  pictures  of  women,  odd  as  it  seems 
to  say  so,  should  be  greatly  attributed  to  natural  chivalry.  His 
conception  of  women  of  his  own  or  a  higher  class  was  always  too 
romantic.  He  hardly  ventured,  as  it  were,  in  his  tenderness  for 
them,  to  look  deeply  into  their  little  weaknesses  and  intricacies  of 
character.    With  women  of  an  inferior  class,  he  had  not  this  feel 

*  Carlyle's  Miscellnneous  Essays,  iv.  i74«-5 


74 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


ing.  Nothing  can  be  more  perfect  than  the  manner  in  which  he 
blends  the  dairy-woman  and  woman  of  business  in  Jeanie  Deans, 
with  the  lover  and  the  sister.  But  once  make  a  woman  beau- 
tiful, or  in  any  way  an  object  of  homage  to  him,  and  Scott  bowed 
so  low  before  the  image  of  her,  that  he  could  not  go  deep  into  her 
heart.  He  could  no  more  have  analysed  such  a  woman,  as  Thack- 
eray analysed  Lady  Castlewood,  or  Amelia,  or  Becky,  or  as  George 
Eliot  analysed  Rosamond  Vincy,  than  he  could  have  vivisected 
Camp  or  Maida.  To  some  extent,  therefore,  Scott's  pictures  of 
women  remain  something  in  the  style  of  the  miniatures  of  the  last 
age — bright  and  beautiful  beings  without  any  special  character  in 
them.  He  was  dazzled  by  a  fair  heroine.  He  could  not  take  them 
up  into  his  imagination  as  real  beings  as  he  did  men.  But  then  how 
living  are  his  men,  whether  coarse  or  noble  !  What  a  picture,  for 
instance,  is  that  in  A  Legend  of  Montrose  of  the  conceited,  prag- 
matic, but  prompt  and  dauntless  soldier  of  fortune,  rejecting  Ar- 
gyle's  attempts  to  tamper  with  him,  in  the  dungeon  at  Inverary, 
suddenly  throwing  himself  on  the  disguised  Duke  so  soon  as  he 
detects  him  by  his  voice,  and  wresting  from  him  the  means  of  his 
own  liberation  !  Who  could  read  that  scene  and  say  for  a  moment 
that  Dalgetty  is  painted  "from  the  skin  inwards"?  It  was  just 
Scott  himself  breathing  his  own  life  through  the  habits  of  a  good 
specimen  of  the  mercenary  soldier — realising  where  the  spirit  of 
hire  would  end,  and  the  sense  of  honour  would  begin — and  pre- 
ferring, even  in  a  dungeon,  the  audacious  policy  of  a  sudden  attack 
to  that  of  crafty  negotiation.  What  a  picture  (and  a  very  different 
one)  again  is  that  in  Redgauntlet  of  Peter  Peebles,  the  mad  litigant, 
with  face  emaciated  by  poverty  and  anxiety,  and  rendered  wild  by 
"  an  insane  lightness  about  the  eyes,"  dashing  into  the  Enghsh  mag- 
istrate's court  for  a  warrant  against  his  fugitive  counsel.  Or,  to 
take  a  third  instance,  as  different  as  possible  from  either,  hov/  power- 
fully conceived  is  the  situation  in  Old  Mortality,  where  Balfour 
of  Burley  in  his  fanatic  fury  at  the  defeat  of  his  plan  for  a  new 
rebellion  pushes  the  oak-tree,  which  connects  his  wild  retreat 
with  the  outer  world,  into  the  stream,  and  tries  to  slay  Morton  for 
opposing  him.  In  such  scenes  and  a  hundred  others— for  these 
are  mer?  random  examples— Scott  undoubtedly  painted  his  mas- 
culine figures  from  as  deep  and  inward  a  conception  of  the  charac- 
ter of  the  situation  as  Goethe  ever  attained,  even  in  drawing  Mignon, 
or  Klarchen,  or  Gretchen.  The  distinction  has  no  real  existence. 
Goethe's  pictures  of  women  were  no  doubt  the  intuitions  of  genius  ; 
and  so  are  Scott's  of  men— and  here  and  there  of  his  women  too. 
Professional  women  he  can  always  paint  with  power.  Meg  Dods, 
the  innkeeper,  Meg  Merrilies,  the  gipsy,  Mause  Headrigg,  the 
Covenanter,  Elspeth,  the  old  fishwife  in  The  Antiquary,  and  the  old 
crones  employed  to  nurse  and  watch,  and  lay  out  the  corpse,  in  lh& 
Bride  of  I^am7ner7noor,  are  all  in  their  way  impressive  figures. 

And  even  in  relation  to  women  of  a  rank  more  fascinating  to 
Scott,  and  whose  inner  character  was  perhaps  on  that  account, 
less  familiar  to  his  imagination,  grant  him  but  a  few  hints  from 


S/K  WALTER  SCOTT. 


75 


histor)^  and  he  draws  a  picture  which,  for  vividness  and  brilliancy, 
may  almost  compare  with  Shakespeare's  own  studies  in  English 
history.  Had  Shakespeare  painted  the  scene  in  The  Abbot,  in 
which  Mary  Stuart  commands  one  of  her  Mary's  in  waiting  to  tell 
her  at  what  bridal  she  last  danced,  and  Mary  fleming  blurts  out 
the  reference  to  the  marriage  of  Sebastian  at  Holyrood,  would  any 
one  hesitate  to  regard  it  as  a  stroke  of  genius  worthy  of  the  great 
dramatist  ?  This  picture  of  the  Queen's  mind  suddenly  thrown 
off  its  balance,  and  betraying,  in  the  agony  of  the  moment,  the  fear 
and  remorse  which  every  association  with  Darnley  conjured  up,  is 
painted  "from  the  heart  outw^ards,"  not  "from  the  skin  inwards," 
if  ever  there  were  such  a  painting  in  the  world.  Scott  hardly  ever 
failed  in  painting  kings  or  peasants,  queens  or  peasant-women. 
There  was  something  in  the  well-marked  type  of  both  to  catch  his 
imagination,  which  can  always  hit  off  the  grander  features  of 
royalty,  and  the  homelier  features  of  laborious  humility.  Is  there 
any  sketch  traced  in  lines  of  more  sweeping  grandeur  and  more 
impressive  force  than  the  following  of  Mary  Stuart's  lucid  interval 
(hi  remorse — lucid  compared  with  her  ordinary  mood,  though  it  was 
of  a  remorse  that  was  almost  delirious — which  breaks  in  upon  her 
hour  of  fascinating  condescension  ? — 

"  *  Are  they  not  a  lovely  couple,  my  Fleming  ?  and  is  it  not  heart-rend- 
ing to  think  that  I  must  be  their  ruin  ? ' 

*'*Not  so,'  said  Roland  Graeme,  Mt  is  we,  gracious  sovereign,  who 
will  be  your  deliverers.'  ^ Ex  oribtis parvuloruvi  !  '  said  the  queen,  look- 
ing upward ;  *  if  it  is  by  the  mouth  of  these  children  that  heaven  calls  me 
to  resume  the  stately  thoughts  which  become  my  birth  and  my  rights,  thou 
wilt  grant  them  thy  protection,  and  to  me  the  power  of  rewarding  their 
zeal.'  Then  turning  to  Fleming,  she  instantly  added,  '  Thou  knowest,  my 
friend,  whether  to  make  those  who  have  served  me  happy,  was  not  ever 
Mary's  favourite  pastime.  When  I  have  been  rebuked  by  the  stern 
preachers  of  the  Calvinistic  heresy — when  I  have  seen  the  fierce  counte- 
nances of  my  nobles  averted  from  me,  has  it  not  been  because  I  mixed  in 
the  harmless  pleasures  of  the  young  and  gay,  and  rather  for  the  sake  of 
their  happiness  than  my  own,  have  mingled  in  the  masque,  the  song  or 
the  dance,  with  the  youth  of  my  household?  Well,  I  repent  not  of  it — 
though  Knox  termed  it  sin,  and  Morton  degradation — I  was  happy  because 
I  saw  happiness  around  me:  and  woe  betide  the  wretched  jealousy  that 
can  extract  guilt  out  of  the  overflowings  of  an  unguarded  gaiety  I — Flem- 
ing, if  we  are  restored  to  our  throne,  shall  we  not  have  one  blithesome 
day  at  a  blithesome  bridal,  of  which  v/e  must  now  name  neither  the  bride 
nor  the  bridegroom  ?  But  that  bridegroom  shall  have  the  barony  or 
Blairgowrie,  a  fair  gift  even  for  a  queen  to  give,  and  that  bride's  chaplet 
shall  be  twined  with  the  fairest  pearls  that  ever  were  found  in  the  depths 
of  Lochlomond ;  and  thou  thyself,  Mary  Fleming,  the  best  dresser  of  tires 
that  ever  busked  the  tresses  of  a  queen,  and  w^ho  would  scorn  to  touch 
those  of  any  woman  of  lower  rank — thou  thyself  shalt  for  my  love  twine 
them  into  the  bride's  tresses. — Look,  my  Pleming,  suppose  then  such 
clustered  locks  as  these  of  our  Catherine,  they  would  not  put  shame  upon 
thy  skill.'  So  saying  she  passed  her  hand  fondly  over  the  head  of  her 
youthful  favourite,  while  her  more  aged  attendant  replied  despondently, 
*  Alas,  madam,  your  thoughts  stray  far  from  home.'    '  They  do,  my  Pleru' 


76 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


ing,'  said  tlie  queen,  'but  is  it  well  or  kind  in  you  to  call  them  back  ?— 
God  knows  they  have  kept  the  perch  this  night  but  too  closely.— Come,  I 
w^ill  recall  the  gay  vision;  were  it  but  to  punish  them.  Yes,  at  that  blithe- 
some bridal,  Mary  herself  shall  forget  the  weight  of  sorrows,  and  the  toil 
of  state,  and  herself  once  more  lead  a  measure. — At  whose  wedding  was 
it  that  we  last  danced,  my  Fleming  ?  I  think  care  has  troubled  my  mem- 
ory— yet  something  of  it  I  should  remember,  canst  thou  not  aid  me  }  I 
know  thou  canst.'    'Alas,  madam,'  replied  the  lady.    *  What,'  said  Mary, 

*  wilt  thou  not  help  us  so  far  ?  this  is  a  peevish  adherence  to  thine  own 
graver  opinion  which  holds  our  talk  as  folly.  But  thou  art  court-bred 
and  wilt  well  understand  me  when  I  say  the  queen  commtuids  Lady  Flem- 
ing to  tell  her  v>'hen  she  led  the  last  branle,^  With  a  face  deadly  pale  and 
a  mien  as  if  she  w^ere  about  to  sink  into  the  earth,  the  court-bred  dam.e, 
no  longer  daring  to  refuse  obedience,  faltered  out,  '  Gracious  lady — if  my 
memory  err  not — it  was  at  a  masque  in  Holyrood — at  the  marriage  of  Se- 
bastian.' The  unhappy  queen,  who  had  hitherto  listened  with  a  melan- 
choly smile,  provoked  by  the  reluctance  w-ith  which  the  Lady  Fleming 
brought  out  her  story,  at  this  ill-fated  word  interrupted  her  with  a  shriek 
so  wild  and  loud  that  the  vaulted  apartment  rang,  and  both  Roland  and 
Catherine  sprung  to  their  feet  in  the  utmost  terror  and  alarm.  Meantime, 
Mary  seemed,  by  the  train  of  horrible  ideas  thus  suddenly  excited,  sur- 
prised not  only  beyond  self-command,  but  for  the  moment  beyond  the 
verge  of  reason.  'Traitress,'  she  said  to  the  Lady  Fleming,  '  thou  wouldst 
slay  thy  sovereign.  Call  my  French  guards — a  moi!  a  moil  7nes  Fran- 
cats  ! — I  am  beset  with  traitors  in  mine  own  palace — they  have  murdered 
my  husband — Rescue  !  Rescue  !  for  the  Queen  of  Scotland  ! '  She  started 
up  from  her  chair — her  features  late  so  exquisitely  lovely  in  their  paleness, 
now  inflamed  with  the  fury  of  frenzy,  and  resembling  those  of  a  Bellona. 
'  We  will  take  the  field  ourself,'  she  said;  'warn  the  city — warn  Lothian 
and  Fife — saddle  our  Spanish  barb,  and  bid  French  Paris  see  our  petroncl 
be  charged.  Better  to  die  at  the  head  of  our  brave  Scotsmen,  like  our 
grandfather  at  Flodden,  than  of  a  broken  heart  like  our  ill-starred  father.' 
'  Be  patient — be  composed,  dearest  sovereign,'  said  Catherine  ;  and  then 
addressing  Lady  Pleming  angrily,  she  added,  '  How  could  you  say  aught 
that  reminded  her  of  her  husband.^'  The  word  reached  the  ear  of  the 
unhappy  princess  who  caught  it  up,  speaking  with  great  rapidity,  'Hus- 
band ! — what  husband  Not  his  most  Christian  Majesty — he  is  ill  at  ease 
— he  cannot  mount  on  horseback — not  him  of  the  Lennox — but  it  was  the 
Duke  of  Orkney  thou  wouldst  say?'.  *  For  God's  love,  madam,  be  pa- 
tient ! '  said  the  Lady  Fleming.  But  the  queen's  excited  imagination  could 
by  no  entreaty  be  diverted  from  its  course.  '  Bid  him  come  hither  to  our 
aid,'  she  said,  'and  bring  with  him  his  lambs,  as  he  calls  them — Bowton, 
Hay  of  Talla,  Black  Ormiston  and  his  kinsman  Hob — Fie,  how  swart  they 
are,  and  how  they  smell  of  sulphur !  What !  closeted  with  Morton  } 
Nay,  if  the  Douglas  and  the  Hepburn  hatch  the  complot  together,  tlie 
bird  when  it  breaks  the  shell  will  scare  Scotland,  will  it  not,  my  Fleming  } ' 

*  vShe  grows  wilder  and  wilder,'  said  Fleming.  '  We  have  too  many  hear- 
ers for  these  strange  words.'  '  Roland,'  said  Catherine,  '  in  the  name  of 
God  begone  ! — you  cannot  aid  us  here — leave  us  to  deal  with  her  alone 
— away — away  I  " 

And  equally  fine  is  the  scene  in  Kenilworth  in  which  Elizabeth 
undertakes  the  reconciliation  of  the  haughty  rivals,  Sussex  and 
Leicester,  unaware  that  in  the  course  of  the  audience  she  herself 
will  have  to  bear  a  great  strain  on  her  self-command,  both  in  her 


SI/^  WALTER  SCOT7, 


77 


feelings  as  a  queen  and  her  feelings  as  a  lover.  I  Icr  grand  rebuked 
to  both,  her  ill-concealed  preference  for  Leicester,  her  whisperes 
ridicule  of  Sussex,  the  impulses  of  tenderness  which  she  stifles, 
the  flashes  of  resentment  to  which  she  gives  way,  the  triumph  of 
policy  over  private  feeling,  her  imperious  impatience  when  she  is 
iDaffled,  her  jealousy  as  she  grows  suspicious  of  a  personal  rival, 
her  gratified  pride  and  vanity  when  the  suspicion  is  exchanged  for 
the  clear  evidence,  as  she  supposes,  of  Leicester's  love,  and  her 
peremptory  conclusion  of  the  audience,  bring  before  the  mind  a 
series  of  pictures  far  more  vivid  and  impressive  than  the  greatest 
of  historical  painters  could  fix  on  canvas,  even  at  the  cost  of  the 
labour  of  years.  Even  more  brilliant,  though  not  so  sustained  and 
difficult  an  effort  of  genius,  is  the  later  scene  in  the  same  story,  in 
which  EHzabeth  drags  the  unhappy  Countess  of  Leicester  from  her 
concealment  in  one  of  the  grottoes  of  Kenilworth  Castle,  and 
strides  off  with  her,  in  a  fit  of  vindicative  humiliation  and  Amazo- 
nian fury,  to  confront  her  with  her  husband.  But  this  last  scene 
no  doubt  is  more  in  Scott's  way.  He  can  always  paint  w'omen  in 
their  more  masculine  moods.  Where  he  frequently  fails  is  in  the 
attempt  to  indicate  the  finer  shades  of  women's  nature.  In  Amy 
Robsart  herself,  for  example,  he  is  by  no  means  generally  success- 
ful, though  in  an  early  scene  her  childish  delight  in  the  various 
orders  and  decorations  of  her  husband  is  painted  with  much  fresh- 
ness and  delicacy.  But  wherever,  as  in  the  case  of  queens,  Scott 
can  get  a  telling  hint  from  actual  history,  he  can  always  so  use  it  as 
to  make  history  itself  seem  dim  to  the  equivalent  for  it  which  he 
gives  us. 

And  yet,  as  every  one  knows,  Scott  was  excessively  free  in  his 
manipulations  of  history  for  the  purposes  of  romance.  In  Kenil' 
worth  he  represents  Shakespeare's  plays  as  already  in  the  mouths 
of  courtiers  and  statesmen,  though  he  lays  the  scene  in  the  eight- 
eenth year  of  Elizabeth,  w^hen  Shakespeare  was  hardly  old  enough 
to  rob  an  orchard.  In  Woodstock^  on  the  contrary,  he  insists,  if 
you  compare  Sir  Henry  Lee's  dates  with  the  facts,  that  Shake- 
speare died  twenty  years  at  least  before  he  actually  died.  The 
historical  basis,  again,  of  Woodstock  and  of  Redgaimtlet  is  thor- 
oughly untrustworthy,  and  about  all  the  minuter  details  of  history, 
— unless  so  far  as  they  were  characteristic  of  the  age, — I  do  not 
suppose  that  Scott  in  his  romances  ever  troubled  himself  at  all. 
And  yet  few  historians — not  even  Scott  himself  when  he  exchanged 
romance  for  history — ever  drew  the  great  figures  of  history  v/ith  so 
powerful  a  hand.  In  writing  history  and  bio^!,raphy  Scott  has  little 
or  no  advantage  over  very  inferior  men.  His  pictures  of  Swift,  of 
Dryden,  of  Napoleon,  are  in  no  way  very  vivid.  It  is  only  where 
he  is  working  from  the  pure  imagination, — though  imagination 
stirred  by  historic  study, — that  he  paints  a  picture  which  follows  us 
about,  as  if  with  living  eyes,  instead  of  creating  for  us  a  mere  series 
of  lines  and  colours.  Indeed,  whether  Scott  draws  truly  or  falsely, 
he  draws  with  such  genius  that  his  pictures  of  Richard  and  Saladin, 
of  Louis  XL  and  Charles  the  Bold,  of  Margaret  of  Anjou  and 


73 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


Rend  of  Provence,  of  Mary  Stuart  and  Elizabeth  Tudor,  of  Sussei 
and  of  Leicester,  of  James  and  Charles  and  Buckingham,  of  the 
two  Dukes  of  Argyle—the  Argyle  of  the  time  of  the  revohation, 
and  the  Argyle  of  George  II., — of  Queen  Caroline,  of  Claverhouse, 
and  Monmouth,  and  of  Rob  Roy,  will  live  in  English  literature 
beside  Sliakespeare's  pictures — probably  less  faithful  if  more 
imaginative — of  John  and  Richard  and  the  later  Henries,  and  all 
the  great  figures  by  whom  they  were  surrounded.  No  historical 
portrait  that  we  possess  will  take  precedence — as  a  mere  portrait 
—of  Scott's  brilliant  study  of  James  I.  in  The  Fortunes  of  AHgeL 
Take  this  illustration  for  instance,  where  George  Heriot  the  gold- 
smith (Jingling  Geordie,  as  the  king  familiarly  calls  him)  has  just 
been  speaking  of  Lord  Huntinglen,  as  a  man  of  the  old  rough 
world  that  will  drink  and  swear  : " — 

'  O  Geordie  !  '  exclaimed  the  king,  *  these  are  auld-warld  frailties, 
of  whilk  we  dare  not  pronounce  even  ourselves  absolutely  free.  But  the 
vvarld  grows  worse  from  day  to  day,  Geordie.  The  juveniles  of  this  age 
may  weel  say  with  the  poet, — 

"  ^tas  parentum  pejor  avis  tulit 
Nos  nequiores — " 

This  Dalgarno  does  not  drink  so  much,  aye  or  swear  so  much,  as  his 
father,  but  he  wenches,  Geordie,  and  he  breaks  his  word  and  oath  baith. 
As  to  what  ye  say  of  the  leddy  and  the  ministers,  we  are  all  fallible  crea- 
tures, Geordie  priests  and  kings  as  weel  as  others ;  and  wha  kens  but  what 
that  may  account  for  the  difference  between  this  Dalgarno  and  his  father  ? 
The  earl  is  the  vera  soul  of  honour,  and  cares  nae  mair  for  warld's  gear 
than  a  noble  hound  for  the  quest  of  a  foulmart ;  but  as  for  his  son,  he  was 
like  to  brazen  us  all  out — ourselves,  Steenie,  Baby  Charles,  and  our 
Council,  till  he  heard  of  the  tocher,  and  then  by  my  kingly  crown  he  lap 
like  a  cock  at  a  grossart  !  These  are  discrepancies  betwixt  parent  and 
son  not  to  be  accounted  for  naturally,  according  to  Baptista  Porta,  Michael 
Scott  de  secretisy  and  others.  Ah,  Jingling  Geordie,  if  your  clouting  the 
caldron,  and  jingling  on  pots,  pans,  and  veshels  of  all  manner  of  metal, 
hadna  jingled  a'  your  grammar  out  of  your  head,  I  could  have  touched  on 
that  matter  to  you  at  mair  length.'  ....  Heriot  inquired  whether 
Lord  Dalgarno  had  consented  to  do  the  I,ady  Hermione  justice.  *  Troth, 
man,  I  have  small  doubt  diat  he  will,'  quoth  the  king,  '  I  gave  him  the 
schedule  of  her  worldly  substance,  which  you  delivered  to  us  in  the 
council,  and  we  allov/edhim  half  an  hour  to  chew  the  cud  upon  that.  It  is 
rare  reading  for  bringing  him  to  reason.  I  left  Baby  Charles  and  Steenie 
laying  his  duty  before  him,  and  if  he  can  resist  doing  what  desire  him, 
why  I  wish  he  would  teach  me  the  gate  of  it.  O  Geordie,  Jingling  Geordie, 
it  was  grand  to  hear  Baby  Charles  laying  down  the  guilt  of  dissimulation, 
and  Steenie  lecturing  on  the  turpitude  of  incontinence.'  *  I  am  afraid,' said 
George  Heriot,  more  hastily  than  prudently,  '  I  might  have  thought  of  the 
old  proverb  of  Satan  reproving  sin.'  *  Deil  hae  our  saul,  neighbour,'  said 
the  king,  reddening,  *  but  ye  are  not  blate  !  I  gie  ye  licence  to  speak 
freely,  and  by  our  saul,  ye  do  not  let  the  privilege  become  lost  non  titendty 
— it  will  suffer  no  negative  ])rescription  in  your  hands.  Is  it  fit,  think  ye, 
til  at  Baby  Charles  should  let  his  thoughts  be  publicly  seen  ?  No,  no, 
princes'  thoughts  are  arcana  iififcriii  qui  ticscit  disswiiiIarCf  ncscit  regnare. 


.S-/A'  WALTER  SCOTT. 


79 


Every  liege  subject  is  bound  to  speak  tlie  whole  trutli  to  the  king,  but 
there  is  nae  reciprocity  of  obligation — and  for  Stcenie  having  been  whiles 
a  dike-louper  at  a  time,  is  it  for  you,  who  are  his  goldsmith,  and  to  whom, 
I  doubt,  he  awes  an  uncomatable  sum,  to  cast  that  up  to  him  ?  " 

Assuredly  there  is  no  undue  favouring  of  Stuarts  in  such  a 
picture  as  that. 

Scott's  humour  is,  I  think,  of  very  different  qualities  in  rela- 
tion to  different  subjects.  Certainly  he  was  at  times  capable  of 
considerable  heaviness  of  hand, — of  the  Scotch  "  wut  which  has 
been  so  irreverently  treated  by  English  critics.  His  rather  elabo- 
rate jocular  introductions,  under  the  name  of  Jedediah  Cleishbo- 
thani  are  clearly  laborious  at  times.  And  even  his  own  letters  to 
his  daughter-in-law,  which  Mr.  Lockhart  seems  to  regard  as  models 
of  tender  playfulness  and  pleasantry,  seem  to  me  decidedly  ele- 
phantine. Not  unfrequently,  too,  his  stereotyped  jokes  weary. 
Dalgetty  bores  you  almost  as  much  as  he  would  do  in  real  life, — 
v/hich  is  a  great  fault  in  art.  Bradwardine  becomes  a  nuisance, 
and  as  for  Sir  Piercie  Sbafton,  he  is  beyond  endurance.  Like 
some  other  Scotchmen  of  genius,  Scott  twanged  away  at  any 
effective  chord  till  it  more  than  lost  its  expressiveness.  But  in 
dry  humour,  and  in  that  higher  humour  which  skilfully  blends  the 
ludicrous  and  the  pathetic,  so  that  it  is  hardly  possible  to  separate 
between  smiles  and  tears,  Scott  is  a  master.  His  canny  innkeeper, 
who  having  sent  away  all  the  peasemeal  to  the  camp  of  the  Cove- 
nanters, and  all  the  oatmeal  (with  deep  professions  of  duty)  to  the 
castle  and  its  cavaliers,  in  compliance  with  the  requisitions  sent  to 
him  on  each  side,  admits  with  a  sigh  to  his  daughter  that  "  they 
maun  gar  wheat  flour  serve  themsels  for  a  blink," — his  firm  of 
solicitors.  Greenhorn  and  Grinderson,  whose  senior  partner  writes 
respectfully  to  clients  in  prosperity,  and  whose  junior  partner  writes 
familiarly  to  those  in  adversity, — his  arbitrary  nabob  who  asks  how 
the  devil  any  one  should  be  able  to  mix  spices  so  well  "  as  one 
who  has  been  where  they  grow;" — his  little  ragamuffin  who  indig- 
nantly denies  that  he  has  broken  his  promise  not  to  gamble  away 
his  sixpences  at  pitch-and-toss  because  he  has  gambled  them  away 
at  "  neevie-neevie-nick-nack," — and  similar  figures  abound  in  his 
tales, — are  all  creations  which  make  one  laugh  inwardly  as  we  read. 
But  he  has  a  much  higher  humour  still,  that  inimitable  power  of 
shading  off  ignorance  into  knowledge  and  simplicity  into  wisdom, 
which  makes  his  picture  of  Jeanie  Deans,  for  instance,  so  humour- 
ous as  well  as  so  affecting.  When  Jeanie  reunites  her  father  to 
her  husband  by  reminding  the  former  how  it  would  sometimes 
happen  that  "  twa  precious  saints  might  pu'  sundrywise  like  twa 
cows  riving  at  the  same  hayband,"  she  gives  us  an  admirable  in- 
stance of  Scott's  higher  humiour.  Or  take  Jeanie  Deans's  letter  to 
her  father  communicating  to  him  the  pardon  of  his  daughter  and 
her  own  interview  with  the  Queen  : — 

"Dearest  AND  truly  honoured  Father. — This  comes  with  my 
duty  to  inform  you,  that  it  has  pleased  God  to  redeem  that  captivitie  oi 


So 


S//^  WALTER  SCOTT. 


my  poor  sister,  in  respect  the  Queen's  blessed  Majesty,  for  whom  we  are 
ever  bound  to  pray,  hath  redeemed  her  soul  from  the  slayer,  granting  the 
ransom  of  her,  whilk  is  ane  pardon  or  reprieve.  And  I  spoke  with  the 
Queen  face  to  face,  and  yet  live;  for  she  is  not  muckle  differing  from 
other  grand  leddies,  saving  that  she  has  a  stately  presence,  and  een  like  a 
blue  huntin'  hawk's,  whilk  gaedthrou'  and  throu'  me  like  a  Highland  durk. 
And  all  this  good  was,  alway  under  the  Great  Giver,  to  whom  ail  are  but 
instruments,  wrought  for  us  by  the  Duke  of  Argile,  wha  is  ane  native  true- 
hearted  Scotsman,  and  not  pridefu',  like  other  folk  we  ken  of — and  like- 
wise skeely  enow  in  bestial,  whereof  he  has  promised  to  gie  me  twa 
Devonshire  kye,  of  which  he  is  enamoured,  although  I  do  still  hand  by 
the  real  hawkit  Airshire  breed — and  I  have  promised  him  a  cheese  ;  and 
I  wad  wuss  ye,  if  Gowans,  the  brockit  cow,  has  a  quey,  that  she  suld  suck 
her  fill  of  milk,  as  I  am  given  to  understand  he  has  none  of  that  breed, 
and  is  not  scornfu'  but  will  take  a  thing  frae  a  puir  body,  that  it  may 
lighten  their  heart  of  the  loading  of  debt  that  they  awe  him.  Also  his 
honour  the  Duke  will  accept  ane  of  our  Dunlop  cheeses,  and  it  sail  be  my 
faut  if  a  better  was  ever  yearned  in  Lowdon." — [Here  follow  some  obser- 
vations respecting  the  breed  of  cattle,  and  the  produce  of  the  dairy,  which 
it  is  our  intention  to  forward  to  the  Board  of  Agriculture.] — Neverthe- 
less, these  are  but  matters  of  the  after-harvest,  in  respect  of  the  great 
good  which  Providence  hath  gifted  us  with — and,  in  especial,  poor  Effie's 
life.  And  oh,  my  dear  father,  since  it  hath  pleased  God  to  be  merciful  to 
her,  let  her  not  want  your  free  pardon,  whilk  will  make  her  meet  to  be  ane 
vessel  of  grace,  and  also  a  comfort  to  your  ain  graie  hairs.  Dear  Father, 
will  ye  let  the  Laird  ken  that  we  have  had  friends  strangely  raised  up  to 
us,  and  that  the  talent  whilk  he  lent  me  will  be  thankfully  repaid.  I  hae 
some  of  it  to  the  fore ;  and  the  rest  of  it  is  not  knotted  up  in  ane  purse  or 
napkin,  but  in  ane  wee  bit  paper,  as  is  the  fashion  heir,  whilk  I  am  as- 
sured is  gude  for  the  siller.  And,  dear  father,  through  Mr.  Butler's 
means  I  hae  gude  friendship  with  the  Duke,  for  there  had  been  kindness 
between  their  forbears  in  the  auld  troublesome  time  byepast.  And  Mrs. 
Glass  has  been  kind  like  my  very  mother.  She  has  a  braw  house  here, 
and  lives  bien  and  warm,  wi'  twa  servant  lasses,  and  a  man  and  a  callant 
in  the  shop.  And  she  is  to  send  you  doun  a  pound  of  her  hie-dried,  and 
some  other  tobaka,  and  we  maun  think  of  some  propine  for  her,  since  her 
kindness  hath  been  great.  And  the  Duk  is  to  send  the  pardon  doun  by 
an  express  messenger,  in  respect  that  I  canna  travel  sae  fast ;  and  I  am 
to  come  doun  wi'  twa  of  his  Honour's  servants— that  is,  John  Archibald, 
a  decent  elderly  gentleman,  that  says  he  has  seen  you  lang  syne,  when  ye 
were  buying  beasts  in  the  west  frae  the  Laird  of  Aughtermuggitie — but 
maybe  ye  winna  mind  him — ony  way,  he's  a  civil  man— and  Mrs.  Dolly 
Dutton,  that  is  to  be  dairy-maid  in  Inverara  :  and  they  bring  me  on  as  far 
as  Glasgo',  whilk  will  make  it  nae  pinch  to  win  hame,  whilk  I  desire  of  all 
things.  May  the  Giver  of  all  good  things  keep  ye  in  your  outgauns  and  in- 
comings, whereof  devoutly  prayeth  your  loving  dauter, 

"Jean  Deans." 

This  contains  an  example  of  Scott's  rather  heavy  jocularity  as 
well  as  giving  us  a  fine  illustration  of  his  highest  and  deepest  and 
sunniest  humour.  Coming  where  it  does,  the  joke  inserted  about 
the  Board  of  Agriculture  is  rather  like  the  gambol  of  a  rhinoceros 
trying  to  imitate  the  curvettings  of  a  thoroughbred  horse. 

Some  of  the  finest  touches  of  his  humour  are  no  doubt  much 


S/J^  iVALTKR  SCOTT. 


heightened  by  his  perfect  command  of  the  genius  as  well  as  the 
dialect  of  a  peasantry,  in  whom  a  true  culture  of  mind  and  some- 
times also  of  heart  is  found  in  the  closest  possible  contact  with 
the  humblest  pursuits  and  the  quaintest  enthusiasm  for  them.  But 
Scott,  with  all  his  turn  for  irony — and  Mr.  Lockhart  says  that  even 
on  his  death-bed  he  used  towards  his  children  the  same  sort  of 
good-humoured  irony  to  which  he  had  always  accustomed  them  in 
his  life — certainly  never  gives  us  any  example  of  that  highest  irony 
which  is  found  so  frequently  in  Shakespeare,  which  touches  the 
paradoxes  of  the  spiritual  life  of  the  children  of  earth,  and  which 
reached  its  highest  point  in  Isaiah.  Now  and  then  in  his  latest 
diaries — the  diaries  written  in  his  deep  affliction — he  comes  near 
the  edge  of  it.  Once,  for  instance,  he  says,  "  What  a  strange  scene 
if  the  surge  of  conversation  could  suddenly  ebb  like  the  tide,  and 
show  us  the  state  of  people's  real  minds  I 

*  No  eyes  the  rocks  discover 
Which  lurk  beneath  the  deep.* 

Life  could  not  be  endured  were  it  seen  in  reality."  But  this  is 
not  irony,  only  the  sort  of  meditation  which,  in  a  mind  inclined  to 
thrust  deep  into  the  secrets  of  life's  paradoxes,  is  apt  to  lead  to 
irony.  Scott,  however,  does  not  thrust  deep  in  this  direction.  He 
met  the  cold  steel  which  inflicts  the  deepest  interior  wounds, 
like  a  soldier,  and  never  seems  to  have  meditated  on  the  higher 
paradoxes  of  life  till  reason  reeled.  The  irony  of  Hamlet  is  far 
from  Scott.  His  imagination  v^as  essentially  one  of  distinct  em- 
bodiment. He  never  even  seemed  so  much  as  to  contemplate  that 
sundering  of  substance  and  form,  that  rending  away  of  out- 
w^ard  garments,  that  unclothing  of  the  soul,  in  order  that  it 
might  be  more  effectually  clothed  upon,  which  is  at  the  heart  of 
anything  that  may  be  called  spiritual  irony.  The  constant  abiding 
of  his  mind  within  the  well-defined  forms  of  some  one  or  other  of 
the  conditions  of  outward  life  and  manners,  among  the  scores  of 
different  spheres  of  human  habit,  was,  no  doubt,  one  of  the  secrets 
of  his  genius  ;  but  it  was  also  its  greatest  limitation. 

6 


82 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


CHAPTER  XI. 

MORALITY  AND  RELIGION. 

The  very  same  causes  which  hmited  Scotf  s  humour  and  ironj 
to  the  commoner  fields  of  experience,  and  prevented  him  from  evet 
introducing  into  his  stories  characters  of  the  highest  type  of  moral 
thoughtfulness,  gave  to  his  own  morality  and  religion,  which  were, 
I  think,  true  to  the  core  so  far  as  they  went,  a  shade  of  distinct 
conventionality.  It  is  no  doubt  quite  true,  as  he  himself  tells  us, 
that  he  took  more  interest  in  his  mercenaries  and  moss-troopers, 
outlaws,  gipsies,  and  beggars,  than  he  did  in  the  fine  ladies  and 
gentlemen  under  a  cloud  whom  he  adopted  as  heroines  and  heroes. 
But  that  was  the  very  sign  of  his  conventionaHsm.  Though  he 
interested  himself  more  in  these  irregular  persons,  he  hardly  ever 
ventured  to  paint  their  inner  life  so  as  to  show  how  little  there  was 
to  choose  between  the  sins  of  those  who  are  at  war  with  society 
and  the  sins  of  those  who  bend  to  the  yoke  of  society.  He  wideneci 
rather  than  narrowed  the  chasm  between  the  outlaw^  and  the  re- 
spectable citizen,  even  while  he  did  not  disguise  his  own  romantic 
interest  in  the  former.  He  extenuated,  no  doubt,  the  sins  of  all 
brave  and  violent  defiers  of  the  law,  as  distinguished  from  the  sins 
of  crafty  and  cunning  abusers  of  the  law.  But  the  leaning  he  had 
to  the  former  was,  as  he  was  willing  to  admit,  what  he  regarded  as 
a  "  naughty  "  leaning.  He  did  not  attempt  for  a  moment  to  balance 
accounts  between  them  and  society.  He  paid  his  tribute  as  a 
matter  of  course  to  the  established  morality,  and  only  put  in  a  word 
or  two  by  v/ay  of  attempt  to  diminish  the  severity  of  the  sentence 
on  the  bold  transgressor.  And  then,  where  what  is  called  the ''law 
of  honour  comes  in  to  traverse  the  law  of  religion,  he  had  no 
scruple  in  setting  aside  the  latter  in  favour  of  the  customs  of  gentle- 
men, without  any  attempt  to  justify  that  course.  Yet  it  is  evident 
from  various  passages  in  his  writings  that  he  held  Christian  duty 
inconsistent  with  duelling,  and  that  he  held  himself  a  sincere 
Christian.  In  spite  of  this,  when  he  was  fifty-six,  and  under  no 
conceivable  hurry  or  perturbation  of  feeling,  but  only  concerned  to 
defend  his  own  conduct — which  was  indeed  plainly  right — as  to  a 
political  disclosure  which  he  had  made  in  his  life  of  Napoleon,  he 
asked  his  old  friend  William  Clerk  to  be  his  second,  if  the  expected 
challenge  from  General  Gourgaud  should  come,  and  declared  his 
firm  intention  of  accepting  it.  On  the  strength  of  official  evidence 
he  had  exposed  some  conduct  of  General  Gourgaud's  at  St.  Helena, 


SIJ^  VVALTER  SCO  IT. 


83 


which  appeared  to  be  far  from  honourable,  and  he  thought  it  his 
duty  on  that  account  to  submit  to  be  shot  at  by  General  Gourgaud, 
if  General  Gourgaud  had  wished  it.  In  writing  to  William  Clerk 
to  ask  him  to  be  his  second,  he  says,  *'Like  a  man  who  finds  him- 
self in  a  scrape,  General  Gourgaud  may  wish  to  fight  himself  out 
of  it,  and  if  tlie  quarrel  should  be  thrust  on  me,  why,  /  will  7iot 
baulk  him,  Jackie,  He  shall  not  dishonour  the  country  through 
my  sides,  I  can  assure  him.''  In  other  words,  Scott  acted  just  as 
he  had  made  Waverley  and  others  of  his  heroes  act,  on  a  code  of 
honour  which  he  knew  to  be  false,  and  he  must  have  felt  in  this 
case  to  be  something  worse.  He  thought  himself  at  that  time 
under  the  most  stringent  obligations  both  to  his  creditors  and  his 
children,  to  do  all  in  his  power  to  redeem  himself  and  his  estate 
from  debt.  Nay,  more,  he  held  that  his  life  was  a  trust  from  his 
Creator,  which  he  had  no  right  to  throw  away  merely  because  a 
man  whom  he  had  not  really  injured,  was  indulging  a  strong  wish 
to  injure  him ;  but  he  could  so  little  brook  the  imputation  of  physi- 
cal cowardice,  that  he  was  moral  coward  enough  to  resolve  to  meet 
General  Gourgaud,  if  General  Gourgaud  lusted  after  a  shot  at  him. 
Nor  is  there  any  trace  preserved  of  so  much  as  a  moral  scruple  in 
his  own  mind  on  the  subject,  and  this  though  there  are  clear  traces 
in  his  other  writings  as  to  what  he  thought  Christian  morality 
required.  But  the  Border  chivalry  was  so  strong  in  Scott  that,  on 
subjects  of  this  kind  at  least,  his  morality  was  the  conventional 
morality  of  a  day  rapidly  passing  away. 

He  showed  the  same  conventional  feehng  in  his  severity  to- 
wards one  of  his  own  brothers  who  had  been  guilty  of  cowardice. 
Daniel  Scott  was  the  black  sheep  of  the  family.  He  got  into  diffi- 
culties in  business,  formed  a  bad  connection  Vv^ith  an  artful  woman, 
and  was  sent  to  try  his  fortunes  in  the  West  Indies.  There  he 
Avas  employed  in  some  service  against  a  body  of  refractory  negroes 
— we  do  not  know  its  exact  nature — and  apparently  showed  the 
white  feather.  Mr.  Lockhart  says  that  he  returned  to  Scotland 
a  dishonoured  man ;  and  though  he  found  shelter  and  compassion 
from  his  mother,  his  brother  would  never  see  him  again.  Nay, 
when,  soon  after,  his  health,  shattered  by  dissolute  indulgence, 
.  .  .  gave  way  altogether,  and  he  died,  as  yet  a  young  man,  the  poet 
refused  either  to  attend  his  funeral  or  to  wear  mourning  for  him, 
like  the  rest  of  his  family.'^  *  Indeed  he  always  spoke  of  him  as 
his  "relative,"  not  as  his  brother.  Here  again  Scott's  severity 
was  due  to  his  brother's  failure  as  a  "  man  of  honour,"  i.e.  in  cour- 
age. He  was  forbearing  enough  with  vices  of  a  different  kind; 
made  John  Ballantyne's  dissipation  the  object  rather  of  his  jokes 
than  of  his  indignation  ;  and  not  only  mourned  for  him,  but  really 
grieved  for  him  when  he  died.  It  is  only  fair  to  say,  however,  that 
for  this  conventional  scorn  of  a  weakness  rather  than  a  sin,  Scott 
sorrowed  sincerely  later  in  life,  and  that  in  sketching  the  physical 
cowardice  of  Connochar  in  The  Fair  Maid  of  Perth,  he  deliberately 


*  Lockhart's  Life  of  Scotty  iii.  19S— 9. 


84 


SIR  WALT/£R  SCOTT. 


made  an  attempt  to  atone  for  this  hardness  towards  his  brother  by 
showing  liow  frequently  the  foundation  of  cowardice  may  be  laid 
in  perfectly  involuntary  physical  temperament,  and  pointing  out 
with  what  noble  elements  of  disposition  it  may  be  combined.  But 
till  reflection  on  many  forms  of  human  character  had  enlarged 
Scott's  charity,  and  perhaps  also  the  range  of  his  speculative  ethics, 
he  remained  a  conventional  moralist,  and  one,  moreover,  the  type 
of  whose  conventional  code  was  borrowed  more  from  that  of  honour 
than  from  that  of  religious  principle.  There  is  one  curious  pas- 
sage in  his  diary,  written  very  near  the  end  of  his  life,  in  which 
Scott  even  seems  to  declare  that  conventional  standards  of  conduct 
are  better,  or  at  least  safer,  than  religious  standards  of  conduct. 
He  says  in  his  diary  for  the  15th  April,  1828, — "Dined  with  Sir 
Robert  Inghs,  and  met  Sir  Thomas  Acland,  my  old  and  kind  friend. 
I  was  happy  to  see  him.  He  may  be  considered  now  as  the  head 
of  the  religious  party  in  the  House  of  Commons — a  powerful  body 
which  Wilberforce  long  commanded.  It  is  a  difficult  situation,  for 
the  adaptation  of  religious  motives  to  earthly  policy  is  apt — among 
the  infinite  delusions  of  the  human  heart — to  be  a  snare."  *  His 
letters  to  his  eldest  son,  the  young  cavalry  officer,  on  his  first  start 
in  life,  are  much  admired  by  Mr.  Lockhart,  but  to  me  they  read  a 
little  hard,  a  httle  worldly,  and  extremely  conventional.  Con- 
ventionality was  certainly  to  his  mind  almost  a  virtue. 

Of  enthusiasm  in  religion  Scott  always  spoke  very  severely, 
both  in  his  novels  and  in  his  letters  and  private  diary.  In  writing 
to  Lord  Montague,  he  speaks  of  such  enthusiasm  as  was  then  pre- 
valent at  Oxford,  and  which  makes,  he  sa3^s,  religion  a  motive  and 
a  pretext  for  particular  lines  of  thinking  in  politics  and  in  temporal 
affairs  "  [as  if  it  could  help,  doing  that !]  as  "  teaching  a  new  way 
of  going  to  the  devil  for  God's  sake,"  and  this  expressly,  because 
when  the  young  are  infected  with  it,  it  disunites  families,  and  sets 
"children  in  opposition  to  their  parents,  -f  He  gives  us,  however, 
one  reason  for  his  dread  of  anything  like  enthusiasms,  which  is  not 
conventional; — that  it  interferes  with  the  submissive  and  tranquil 
mood  which  is  the  only  true  religious  mood.  Speaking  in  his  diary 
of  a  weakness  and  fluttering  at  the  heart,  from  which  he  had  suf- 
fered, he  says,  "  It  is  an  awful  sensation,  and  would  have  made  an 
enthusiast  of  me,  had  I  indulged  my  imagination  on  rehgious  sub- 
jects. I  have  been  always  careful  to  place  my  mind  in  the  most 
tranquil  posture  which  it  can  assume,  during  my  private  exercises 
of  devotion."  X  And  in  this  avoidance  of  indulging  the  imagina- 
tion on  religious,  or  even  spiritual  subjects,  Scott  goes  far  beyond 
Shakespeare.  I  do  not  think  tliere  is  a  single  study  in  all  his  ro- 
mances of  what  may  be  fairly  called  a  pre-eminently  spiritual  char- 
acter as  such,  though  Jeanie  Deans  approaches  nearest  to  it.  The 
same  may  be  said  of  Shakespeare.  13ut  Shakespeare  though  he 
has  never  drawn  a  pre-eminently  spiritual  character,  often  enough 
indulged  his  imagination  while  meditating  on  spiritual  themes. 


*  Lockhart's  Life  of  Scott,  ix  231. 
t  Ibid.,  vii.  255-6.  +  Ibid.,  viii.  292. 


^VA'  WALTER  SCOTT.  g; 


CHAPTER  XII. 

DISTRACTIONS  AND  AMUSEMENTS  AT  ABBOTSFORD. 

Between  1814  and  the  end  of  1825,  Scott's  literary  labour  was 
interrupted  only  by  one  serious  illness,  and  hardly  interrupted  by 
that, — by  a  few  journeys, — one  to  Paris  after  the  battle  of  Waterloo, 
and  several  to  London, — and  by  the  worry  of  a  constant  stream  of  in- 
trusive visitors.  Of  his  journeys  he  has  left  some  records  ;  but  I 
cannot  say  that  I  think  Scott  would  ever  have  reached,  as  a  mere 
observer  and  recorder,  at  all  the  high  point  which  he  reached  di- 
rectly his  imagination  went  to  work  to  create  a  story.  That  im- 
agination was,  indeed,  far  less  subservient  to  his  mere  perceptions 
than  to  his  constructive  powers.  Paurs  Leite7's  to  his  Kinsfolk 
— the  records  of  his  Paris  Journey  after  Waterloo — for  instance, 
are  not  at  all  above  the  mark  of  a  good  special  correspondent.  His 
imagination  was  less  the  imagination  of  insight,  than  the  imagina- 
tion of  one  whose  mind  was  a  great  kaleidoscope  of  human  life  and 
fortunes.  But  far  more  interrupting  than  either  illness  or  travel, 
was  the  lion-hunting  of  which  Scott  became  the  object,  directly 
after  the  publication  of  the  earlier  novels.  In  great  measure,  no 
doubt,  on  account  of  the  mystery  as  to  his  authorship,  his  fame 
became  something  oppressive.  At  one  time  as  many  as  sixteen 
parties  of  visitors  applied  to  see  Abbottsford  in  a  single  day. 
Strangers, — especially  the  American  travellers  of  that  day,  who 
were  much  less  reticent  and  more  irrepressible  than  the  American 
travellers  of  this, — would  come  to  him  w^ithout  introductions,  face- 
tiously cry  out  "  Prodigious  !  "  in  imitation  of  Dominie  Sampson, 
whatever  they  were  shown,  inquire  whether  the  new  house  was 
called  Tullyveolan  or  Tillytudlem,  cross-examine,  with  open  note- 
books, as  to  Scott's  age,  and  the  age  of  his  wife,  and  appear  to  be 
taken  quite  by  surprise  when  they  were  bowed  out  without  being 
asked  to  dine.*  In  those  days  of  high  postage  Scott's  bill  for 
letters  "  seldom  came  under  150/.  a  year,"  and  "  as  to  coach  parcels, 
they  were  a  perfect  ruination."  On  one  occasion  a  mighty  pack- 
age came  by  post  from  the  United  States,  for  which  Scott  had  to 
pay  five  pounds  sterling.  It  contained  a  MS.  play  called  The 
Cherokee  Lovers^  by  a  young  lady  of  New  York,  who  begged  Scott 
to  read  and  correct  it,  write  a  prologue  and  epilogue,  get  it  put  on 

*  Lockhart's  Life  of  Scott,  v.  387. 


86 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


the  stage  at  Drury  Lane,  and  negotiate  with  Constable  or  Murray 
for  the  copyright.  In  about  a  fornight  another  packet  not  less 
formidable  arrived,  charged  with  a  similar  postage,  which  Scott, 
not  grown  cautious  through  experience,  recklessly  opened;  out 
jumped  a  duplicate  copy  of  The  Cherokee  Lovers^  with  a  second 
letter  from  the  authoress,  stating  that  as  the  weather  had  been 
stormy,  and  she  feared  that  something  might  have  happened  to  her 
former  MS.,  she  had  thought  it  prudent  to  send  him  a  duplicate.* 
Of  course,  when  fame  reached  such  a  point  as  this,  it  became  both 
a  worry  and  a  serious  waste  of  money,  and  what  was  far  more  valu- 
able than  money,  of  time,  privacy,  and  tranquillity  of  mind.  And 
though  no  man  ever  bore  such  worries  with  the  equanimity  of 
Scott,  no  man  ever  received  less  pleasure  from  the  adulation  of  un- 
known and  often  vulgar  and  ignorant  admirers.  His  real  amuse- 
ments were  his  trees  and  his  friends.  "  Planting  and  pruning 
trees,"  he  said  "  I  could  work  at  from  morning  to  night.  There  is 
a  sort  of  seif-congratulation,  a  little  tickling  self-flattery,  in  the  idea 
that  while  you  are  pleasing  and  amusing  yourself,  you  are  seriously 
contributing  to  the  future  welfare  of  the  country,  and  that  your  very 
acorn  may  send  its  future  ribs  of  oak  to  future  victories  like  Trafal- 
gar,'* f — for  the  day  of  iron  ships  was  not  yet.  And  again,  at  a 
later  stage  of  his  planting : — "  You  can  have  no  idea  of  the  ex- 
quisite delight  of  a  planter, — he  is  like  a  painter  laying  on  his 
colours, — at  every  moment  he  sees  his  effects  coming  out.  There 
is  no  art  or  occupation  comparable  to  this;  it  is  full  of  past,  pres- 
ent, and  future  enjoyment.  I  look  back  to  the  time  when  there  was 
not  a  tree  here,  only  bare  heath ;  I  look  round  and  see  thousands 
of  trees  growing  up,  all  of  which,  I  may  say  almost  each  of  which, 
have  received  my  personal  attention.  I  remember,  five  years  ago, 
looking  forward  with  the  most  delighted  expectation  to  this  very 
hour,  and  as  each  year  has  passed,  the  expectation  has  gone  on  in- 
creasing. I  do  the  same  now.  I  anticipate  w^hat  this  plantation 
and  that  one  will  presently  be,  if  only  taken  care  of,  and  there  is 
not  a  spot  of  which  I  do  not  watch  the  progress.  Unlike  building, 
or  even  painting,  or  indeed  any  other  kind  of  pursuit,  this  has  no 
end,  and  is  never  interrupted ;  but  goes  on  from  day  to  day,  and 
from  year  to  year,  with  a  perpetually  augmenting  interest.  Farm- 
ing I  hate.  What  have  I  to  do  with  fattening  and  killing  beasts, 
or  raising  corn,  only  to  cut  it  down,  and  to  wrangle  with  farmers 
about  prices,  and  to  be  constantly  at  the  mercy  of  the  seasons  ? 
There  can  be  no  such  disappointments  or  annoyances  in  planting 
trees."  J  Scott  indeed  regarded  planting  as  a  mode  of  so  mould 
ing  the  form  and  colour  of  the  outward  world,  that  nature  herself 
became  indebted  to  him  for  finer  outlines,  richer  masses  of  colour, 
and  deeper  shadows,  as  well  as  for  more  fertile  and  sheltered  soils. 
And  he  was  as  skilful  in  producing  the  last  result,  as  he  was  in  the 
artistic  effects  of  his  planting.    In  the  essay  on  the  planting  of 

*  Lockhart's  Life  of  Scott,  v.  382. 
t  Lockhart's  Life  of  Scott,  iii.  288. 
%  Lockliart's  Life  of  Scotiy  vii»  287-8. 


.S-/A"  WALTER  SCOTT. 


87 


waste  lands,  he  mentions  a  story, — drawn  from  his  own  experience, 
— of  a  planter,  who  having  scooped  out  the  lowest  part  of  his  land 
for  enclosures,  and  "plaiited  the  wood  round  them  in  masses  en- 
larged or  contracted  as  the  natural  lying  of  the  ground  seemed  to 
dictate,"  met,  six  years  after  these  changes,  his  former  tenant  on 

the  ground,  and  said  to  him,  "  I  suppose,  Mr.  R  ,  you  will  say 

I  have  ruined  your  farm  by  laying  half  of  it  into  woodland  ? "  "I 

should  have  expected  it,  sir,"  answered  Mr.  R  ,  "  if  you  had 

told  me  beforehand  what  you  were  going  to  do ;  but  I  am  now  of 
a  very  different  opinion ;  and  as  I  am  looking  for  land  at  present, 
if  you  are  inclined  to  take  for  the  remaining  sixty  acres  the  same 
rent  which  I  formerly  gave  for  a  hundred  and  twenty,  I  will  give  you 
an  offer  to  that  amount.  I  consider  the  benefit  of  the  enclosing,  and 
the  complete  shelter  afforded  to  the  fields,  as  an  advantage  which 
fairly  counterbalances  the  loss  of  one-half  of  the  land."  * 

And  Scott  was  not  only  thoughtful  in  his  own  planting,  but 
induced  his  neighbours  to  become  so  too.  So  great  was  their 
regard  for  him,  that  many  of  them  planted  their  estates  as  much 
with  reference  to  the  effect  which  their  plantations  would  have  on 
the  view  from  Abbotsford,  as  with  reference  to  the  effect  they 
would  have  on  the  view  from  their  own  grounds.  Many  was  the 
consultation  which  he  and  his  neighbours,  Scott  of  Gala,  for  in- 
stance, and  Mr.  Henderson  of  Eildon  Hall,  had  together  on  the 
effect  which  would  be  produced  on  the  view  from  their  respective 
houses,  of  the  planting  going  on  upon  the  lands  of  each.  The  reci- 
procity of  feeling  was  such  that  the  various  proprietors  acted  more 
like  brothers  in  this  matter,  than  like  the  jealous  and  exclusive 
creatures  which  landowners,  as  such,  so  often  are. 

Next  to  his  interest  in  the  management  and  growth  of  his  ovv-n 
little  estate  was  Scott's  interest  in  the  management  and  growth  of 
the  Duke  of  Buccleuch's.  To  the  Duke  he  looked  up  as  the  head 
of  his  clan,  with  something  almost  more  than  a  feudal  attachment, 
greatly  enhanced  of  course  by  the  personal  friendship  which  he 
had  formed  for  him  in  early  life  as  the  Earl  of  Dalkeith.  This 
mixture  of  feudal  and  personal  feeling  towards  the  Duke  and 
Duchess  of  Buccleuch  continued  during  their  lives.  Scott  was 
away  on  a  yachting  tour  to  the  Shetlands  and  Orkneys  in  July  and 
August,  1 81 4,  and  it  was  during  this  absence  that  the  Duchess  of 
Buccleuch  died.  Scott,  who  was  in  no  anxiety  about  her,  employed 
himself  in  writing  an  amusing  descriptive  epistle  to  the  Duke  in 
rough  verse,  chronicling  his  voyage,  and  containing  expressions 
of  the  profoundest  reverence  for  the  goodness  and  charity  of  the 
Duchess,  a  letter  which  did  not  reach  its  destination  till  after  the 
Duchess's  death.  Scott  himself  heard  of  her  death  by  chance 
when  they  landed  for  a  few  hours  on  the  coast  of  Ireland  ;  he  was 
quite  overpowered  by  the  news,  and  went  to  bed  only  to  drop  into 
short  nightmare  sleeps,  and  to  wake  with  the  dim  memory  of  some 
heavy  weight  at  his  heart.    The  Duke  himself  died  five  years  later. 


Scott's  Miscellaneous  Prose  Works^  xxi.  22-3. 


88 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


leaving  a  son  only  thirteen  years  of  age  (the  present  Duke),  over 
whose  interests,  both  as  regarded  his  education  and  his  estates, 
Scott  watched  as  jealously  as  if  they  had  been  those  of  his  own 
son.  Many  were  the  anxious  letters  he  wrote  to  Lord  Montague 
as  to  his  "young  chief's  affairs,  as  he  called  them,  and  great  his 
pride  in  watching  the  promise  of  his  youth.  Nothing  can  be  clearer 
than  that  to  Scott  the  feudal  principle  was  something  far  beyond  a 
name  ;  that  he  had  at  least  as  much  pride  in  his  devotion  to  his 
chief,  as  he  had  in  founding  a  house  which  he  believed  would  in- 
crease the  influence — both  territorial  and  personal — of  the  clan  of 
Scotts.  The  unaffected  reverence  which  he  felt  for  the  Duke, 
though  mingled  with  warm  personal  affection,  showed  that  Scott's 
feudal  feeling  had  something  real  and  substantial  in  it,  which  did 
not  vanish  even  when  it  came  into  close  contact  with  strong  per- 
sonal  feelings.  This  reverence  is  curiously  marked  in  his  letters. 
He  speaks  of  "  the  distinction  of  rank  "  being  ignored  by  both 
sides,  as  of  som.ething  quite  exceptional,  but  it  was  never  really 
ignored  by  him,  for  though  he  continued  to  write  to  the  Duke  as  an 
intimate  friend,  it  was  with  a  mingling  of  awe,  very  different  indeed 
from  that  which  he  ever  adopted  to  Ellis  or  Erskine.  It  is  ne- 
cessary to  remember  this,  not  only  in  estimating  the  strength  of 
the  feeling  which  made  him  so  anxious  to  become  himself  the 
founder  of  a  house  within  a  house, — of  a  new  branch  of  the  clan  of 
Scotts,— but  in  estimating  the  loyalty  which  Scott  always  displayed 
to  one  of  the  least  respectable  of  English  sovereigns,  George  IV., 
— a  matter  of  which  I  must  now  say  a  few  words,  not  only  because 
it  led  to  Scott's  receiving  the  baronetcy,  but  because  it  forms  to  my 
mind  the  most  grotesque  of  all  the  threads  in  the  lot  of  this  strong 
and  proud  man. 


S/A  WALTER  SCOTT. 


89 


CHAPTER  XIII. 

SCOTT  AND  GEORGE  IV. 

The  first  relations  of  Scott  with  the  Court  were,  oddly  enough, 
formed  with  the  Princess,  not  with  the  Prince  of  Wales.  In  1806 
Scott  dined  with  the  Princess  of  Wales  at  Blackheath,  and  spoke 
of  his  invitation  as  a  great  honour.  He  wrote  a  tribute  to  her 
father,  the  Duke  of  Brunswick,  in  the  introduction  to  one  of  the 
cantos  of  Marmion,  and  received  from  the  Princess  a  silver  vase 
in  acknowledgment  of  this  passage  in  the  poem.  Scott's  relations 
with  the  Prince  Regent  seem  to  have  begun  in  an  offer  to  Scott  of 
the  Laureateship  in  the  summer  of  18 [3,  an  offer  which  Scott  would 
have  found  it  very  difficult  to  accept,  so  strongly  did  his  pride 
revolt  at  the  idea  of  having  to  commemorate  in  verse,  as  an  official 
duty,  all  conspicuous  incidents  affecting  the  throne.  But  he  was 
at  the  time  of  the  offer  in  the  thick  of  his  first  difficulties  on  ac- 
count of  Messrs.  John  Ballantyne  and  Co.,  and  it  was  only  the 
Duke  of  Buccleuch's  guarantee  of  4000/. — a  guarantee  subse- 
quently cancelled  by  Scott's  paying  the  sum  for  which  it  was  a 
security — that  enabled  him  at  this  time  to  decline  what,  after 
Southey  had  accepted  it,  he  compared  in  a  letter  to  Southey  to 
the  herring  for  which  the  poor  Scotch  clergyman  gave  thanks  in  a 
grace  wherein  he  described  it  as  even  this,  the  very  least  of  Prov- 
idence's mercies."  In  March,  181 5,  Scott  being  then  in  London, 
the  Prince  Regent  asked  him  to  dinner,  addressed  him  uniformly 
as  Walter,  and  struck  up  a  friendship  with  him  which  seems  to 
have  lasted  their  lives,  and  which  certainly  did  much  more  honour 
to  George  than  to  Sir  Walter  Scott.  It  is  impossible  not  to  think 
rather  better  of  George  IV.  for  thus  valuing,  and  doing  his  best  in 
every  way  to  show  his  value  for,  Scott.  It  is  equally  impossible 
not  to  think  rather  worse  of  Scott  for  thus  valuing,  and  in  every  way 
doing  his  best  to  express  his  value  for,  this  very  worthless,  though 
by  no  means  incapable  king.  The  consequences  were  soon  seen 
in  the  indignation  with  which  Scott  began  to  speak  of  the  Princess 
of  Wales's  sins.  In  1806,  in  the  squib  he  wrote  on  Lord  Melville's 
acquittal,  when  impeached  for  corruption  by  the  Liberal  Govera 
ment,  he  had  written  thus  of  the  Princess  CaroHne  : — 

Our  King  too — our  Princess, — I  dare  not  say  more,  sir, — 
May  Providence  watch  them  with  mercy  and  might ! 


90 


S/A  WALTER  SCOTT, 


While  there's  one  Scottish  hand  that  can  wag  a  claymore,  sir, 
They  shall  ne'er  want  a  friend  to  stand  up  for  their  right. 
Be  damn'd  he  that  dare  not — 
For  my  part  I'll  spare  not 
To  beauty  afflicted  a  tribute  to  give ; 
F;ll  it  up  steadily, 
Drink  it  off  readily, 
Here's  to  the  Princess,  and  long  may  she  live." 

Bat  whoever  stood  up"  for  the  Princess's  right,  certainly  Scott 
did  not  do  so  after  his  intimacy  with  the  Prince  Regent  began.  He 
mentioned  her  only  with  severity,  and  in  one  letter  at  least,  written 
to  his  brother,  with  something  much  coarser  than  severity ;  *  but 
the  king's  similar  vices  did  not  at  all  alienate  him  from  what  at 
least  had  all  the  appearance  of  a  deep  personal  devotion  to  his 
sovereign.  The  first  baronet  whom  George  IV.  made  on  succeed- 
ing to  the  throne,  after  his  long  Regency,  was  Scott,  who  not  only 
accepted  the  honour  gratefully,  but  dwelt  with  extreme  pride  on 
the  fact  that  it  was  offered  to  him  by  the  king  himself,  and  was  in 
no  way  due  to  the  prompting  of  any  minister's  advice.  He  wrote  to 
Joanna  Baillie  on  hearing  of  the  Regent's  intention — for  the  offer 
was  made  by  the  Regent  at  the  end  of  1818,  though  it  was  not 
actually  conferred  till  after  George's  accession,  namely,  on  the 
30th  March,  1820, — "  The  Duke  of  Buccleuch  and  Scott  of  Harden, 
v/ho,  as  the  heads  of  my  clan  and  the  sources  of  my  gentry,  are 
good  judges  of  what  I  ought  to  do,  have  both  given  me  their  earnest 
opinion  to  accept  of  an  honour  directly  derived  from  the  source  of 
honour,  and  neither  begged  nor  bought,  as  is  the  usual  fashion. 
Several  of  my  ancestors  bore  the  title  in  the  seventeenth  century, 
and,  were  it  of  consequence,  I  have  no  reason  to  be  ashamed  of 
the  decent  and  respectable  persons  who  connect  me  with  that  period 
when  they  carried  into  the  field,  like  Madoc, 

"The  Crescent  at  whose  gleam  the  Cambrian  oft 
Cursing  his  perilous  tenure,  wound  his  horn," 

so  that,  as  a  gentleman,  I  may  stand  on  as  good  a  footing  as  other 
new  creations."  f  Why  the  honour  was  any  greater  for  coming 
from  such  a  king  as  George,  than  it  would  have  been  if  it  had  been 
suggested  by  Lord  Sidmouth,  or  even  Lord  Liverpool,  or  half  as 
great  as  if  Mr.  Canning  had  proposed  it,  it  is  not  easy  to  conceive. 
George  was  a  fair  judge  of  literary  merit,  but  not  one  to  be  com- 
pared for  a  moment  with  that  great  orator  and  wit  ;  and  as  to  his 
being  the  fountain  of  honour,  there  was  so  much  dishonour  of  which 
the  king  was  certainly  the  fountain  too,  that  I  do  not  think  it  was 
very  easy  for  two  fountains  both  springing  from  such  a  person  to 
have  flowed  quite  unmingled.  George  justly  prided  himself  on  Sir 
Walter  Scott's  having  been  the  first  creation  of  his  reign,  and  I 
think  the  event  showed  that  the  poet  was  the  fountain  of  much 
more  honour  for  the  king,  than  the  king  was  for  the  poet. 


•  Lockhart's  Li/e  0/  Scott ^  vi.  229-30. 


t  Ibid.,  vi.  13,  14. 


S//^  WALTER  SCOTT. 


When  George  came  to  Edinburgh  in  1822,  it  was  Sir  Walter 
who  acted  virtually  as  the  master  of  the  ceremonies,  and  to  whom 
it  was  chiefly  due  tliat  the  visit  was  so  successful.  It  was  then 
that  George  clad  his  substantial  person  for  the  first  time  in  the 
Hio^hland  costume — to  wit,  in  the  Steuart  Tartans — and  was  so 
much  annoyed  to  find  himself  outvied  by  a  wealthy  alderman,  Sir 
William  Curtis,  who  had  gone  and  done  likewise,  and,  in  his 
equally  grand  Steuart  Tartans,  seemed  a  kind  of  parody  of  the 
king.  The  day  on  which  the  king  arrived,  Tuesday,  14th  of 
August,  1822,  was  also  the  day  on  which  Scott's  most  intimate 
friend,  William  Erskine,  then  Lord  Kinnedder,  died.  Yet  Scott 
went  on  board  the  royal  yacht,  was  most  graciously  received  by 
George,  had  his  health  drunk  by  the  king  in  a  bottle  of  Highland 
whiskey,  and  with  a  proper  show  of  devoted  loyalty  entreated  tc 
be  allowed  to  retain  the  glass  out  of  which  his  Majesty  had  just 
drunk  his  health.  The  request  was  graciously  acceded  to,  but  Jet 
it  be  pleaded  on  Scott's  behalf,  that  on  reaching  home  and  finding 
there  his  friend  Crabbe  the  poet,  he  sat  down  on  the  royal  gift,  and 
crushed  it  to  atoms.  One  would  hope  that  he  was  really  thinking 
more  even  of  Crabbe,  and  much  more  of  Erskine,  than  of  the  royal 
favour  for  which  he  had  appeared,  and  doubtless  had  really  believed 
himself,  so  grateful.  Sir  Walter  retained  his  regard  for  the  king, 
such  as  it  was,  to  the  last,  and  even  persuaded  himself  that 
George's  death  would  be  a  great  political  calamity  for  the  nation. 
And  really  I  cannot  help  thinking  that  Scott  believed  more  in  the 
king,  than  he  did  in  his  friend  George  Canning.  Assuredly,  greatly 
as  he  admired  Canning,  he  condemned  him  more  and  more  as  Can- 
ning grew  more  liberal,  and  sometimes  speaks  of  liis  veerings  in 
that  direction  with  positive  asperity.  George,  on  the  other  hand, 
who  believed  more  in  number  one  than  in  any  other  number,  how- 
ever large,  became  much  more  conservative  after  he  became  Re- 
gent than  he  was  before,  and  as  he  grev/  more  conservative  Scott 
grew  more  conservative  likewise,  till  he  came  to  think  this  particu- 
lar king  almost  a  pillar  of  the  Constitution.  I  suppose  we  ought 
to  explain  this  little  bit  of  fetish-worship  in  Scott  much  as  we 
should  the  quaint  practical  adhesion  to  duelling  which  he  gave  as 
an  old  man,  who  had  had  all  his  life  much  more  to  do  with  the  pen 
than  the  sword — that  is,  as  an  evidence  of  the  tendency  of  an  im- 
proved type  to  recur  to  that  of  the  old  wild  stock  on  which  it  had 
iDcen  grafted.  But  certainly  no  feudal  devotion  of  his  ancestors 
to  their  chief  was  ever  less  justified  by  moral  qualities  than  Scott's 
loyal  devotion  to  the  fountain  of  honour  as  embodied  in  ''our  fat 
friend."  The  whole  relation  to  George  was  a  grotesque  thread  in 
Scott's  life ;  and  I  cannot  quite  forgive  him  for  the  utterly  conven- 
tional severity  with  which  he  threw  ov^er  his  first  patron,  the  Queen, 
for  sins  which  were  certainly  not  grosser,  if  they  were  not  much 
less  gross,  than  those  of  his  second  patron,  the  husband  v/ho  had 
set  her  the  example  which  she  faithfully,  though  at  a  distance,  fol- 
lowed. 


93 


S/A'  WALTER  SCOrT 


CHAPTER  XIV. 

SCOTT  AS  A  POLITICIAN. 

Scott  usually  professed  great  ignorance  of  politics,  and  did 
what  he  could  to  hold  aloof  from  a  world  in  which  his  feelings 
were  very  easily  heated,  while  his  knowledge  was  apt  to  be  very 
imperfect.  But  now  and  again,  and  notably  towards  the  close  of 
his  life,  he  got  himself  mixed  up  in  pohtics,  and  I  need  hardly  say 
that  it  was  always  on  the  Tory,  and  generally  on  the  red-hot  Tory, 
side.  His  first  hasty  intervention  in  politics  was  the  song  I  have 
just  referred  to  on  Lord  Melville's  acquittal,  during  the  short  Whig 
administration  of  1806.  In  fact  Scott's  comparative  abstinence 
from  politics  was  due,  I  believe,  chiefly  to  the  fact  that  during 
almost  the  whole  of  his  literary  Hfe,  Tories  and  not  Whigs  were  in 
power.  No  sooner  was  any  reform  proposed^  any  abuse  threatened, 
than  Scott's  eager  Conservative  spirit  flashed  up.  Proposals  were 
made  in  1806  for  changes — and,  as  it  was  thought,  reforms — in  the 
Scotch  Courts  of  Law,  and  Scott  immediately  saw  something  like 
national  calamity  in  the  prospect.  The  mild  proposals  in  question 
were  discussed  at  a  meeting  of  the  Faculty  of  Advocates,  when 
Scott  made  a  speech  longer  than  he  had  ever  before  dehvered,  and 
animated  by  a  flow  and  energy  of  eloquence  "  for  which  those 
who  were  accustomed  to  hear  his  debating  speeches  were  quite  un- 
prepared. He  walked  home  between  two  of  the  reformers,  Mr. 
Jeffrey  and  another,  when  his  companions  began  to  compliment 
him  on  his  eloquence,  and  to  speak  playfully  of  its  subject.  But 
Scott  was  in  no  mood  for  playfulness.  "  No,  no,*'  he  exclaimed, 
"  'tis  no  laughing  matter  ;  little  by  little,  whatever  your  wishes  may 
be,  you  will  destroy  and  undermine,  until  nothing  of  what  makes 
Scotland  Scotland  shall  remain  !  "  And  so  saying,"  adds  Mr. 
Lockhart,  "  he  turned  round  to  conceal  his  agitation,  but  not  until 
Mr.  Jeffrey  saw  tears  gushing  down  his  cheek, — resting  his  head, 
until  he  recovered  himself,  on  the  wall  of  the  Mound."  *  It  was 
the  same  strong  feehng  for  old  Scotch  institutions  which  broke 
out  so  quaintly  in  the  midst  of  his  own  worst  troubles  in  1826,  on 
behalf  of  the  Scotch  banking-system,  when  he  so  eloquently  de- 
fended in  the  letters  of  Malachi  Mala^rozvther^  what  would  now 


Lockhart's  Life  0/ Scottt  ii.  328. 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


93 


be  called  Home-Rule  for  Scotland,  and  indeed  really  defeated  the 
attempt  of  his  friends  the  Tories,  who  were  the  innovators  this 
time,  to  encroach  on  those  sacred  institutions — the  Scotch  one- 
pound  note,  and  the  private-note  circulation  of  the  Scotch  banks. 
But  when  I  speak  of  Scott  as  a  Home-Ruler,  I  should  add  that  had 
not  Scotland  been  for  generations  governed  to  a  great  extent,  and, 
as  he  thought  successfully,  by  Home-Rule,  he  was  far  too  good  a 
Conservative  to  have  apologised  for  it  at  all.  The  basis  of  his 
Conservatism  was  always  the  danger  of  undermining  a  system 
which  had  answered  so  well.  In  the  concluding  passages  of  the 
letters  to  which  I  have  just  referred,  he  contrasts  Theory,  a  scrcll 
in  her  hand,  full  of  deep  and  mysterious  combinations  of  figures, 
the  least  failure  in  anyone  of  which  may  alter  the  result  entirely," 
with  "a  practical  system  successful  for  upwards  of  a  century." 
His  vehement  and  unquailing  opposition  to  Reform  in  almost  the 
very  last  year  of  his  life,  when  he  had  already  suffered  more  than 
one  stroke  of  paralysis,  was  grounded  on  precisely  the  same  argu- 
ment. At  Jedburgh,  on  the  2ist  March,  1831,  he  appeared  in  the 
midst  of  an  angry  population  (who  hooted  and  jeered  at  him  till  he 
turned  round  fiercely  upon  them  with  the  defiance,  I  regard  your 
gabble  no  more  than  the  geese  on  the  green,")  to  urge  the  very 
same  protest.  "We  in  this  district,"  he  said,  "are  proud,  and 
with  reason,  that  the  first  chain  bridge  was  the  work  of  a  Scotch- 
man. It  still  hangs  where  he  erected  it  a  pretty  long  time  ago. 
The  French  heard  of  our  invention,  and  determined  to  introduce 
it,  but  with  great  improvements  and  embellishments.  A  friend  of 
my  own  saw  the  thing  tried.  It  was  on  the  Seine  at  Marly.  The 
French  chain-bridge  looked  lighter  and  airier  than  the  prototype. 
Every  Englishman  present  was  disposed  to  confess  that  we  had 
been  beaten  at  our  own  trade.  But  by-and-by  the  gates  were 
opened,  and  the  multitude  were  to  pass  over.  It  began  to  swing 
rather  formidably  beneath  the  pressure  of  the  good  company;  and 
by  the  time  the  architect,  who  led  the  procession  in  great  pomp 
and  glory,  reached  the  middle,  the  whole  gave  way,  and  he — worthy, 
patriotic  artist — was  the  first  that  got  a  ducking.  They  had  forgot 
the  middle  bolt, — or  rather  this  ingenious  person  had  conceived 
that  to  be  a  clumsy-looking  feature,  which  might  safely  be  dis- 
pensed with,  while  he  put  some  invisible  gimcrack  of  his  own  to 
supply  its  place."  *  It  is  strange  that  Sir  Waiter  did  not  see  that 
this  kind  of  criticism,  so  far  as  it  applied  at  all  to  such  an  experi- 
ment as  the  Reform  Bill,  was  even  more  in  point  as  a  rebuke  to 
the  rashness  of  the  Scotch  reformer  who  hung  the  first  successful 
chain-bridge,  than  to  the  rashness  of  the  French  reformer  of  reform 
who  devised  an  unsuccessful  variation  on  it.  The  audacity  of  the 
first  experiment  was  much  the  greater,  though  the  competence  of 
the  person  who  made  it  was  the  greater  also.  And  as  a  matter  of 
fact,  the  political  structure  against  the  supposed  insecurity  of 
which  Sir  Walter  was  protesting,  with  all  the  courage  of  'that 


*  Lockhart's  Life  of  Scott ^  x-  47. 


94 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


dauntless  though  dying  nature,  was  made  by  one  who  understood 
his  work  at  least  as  well  as  the  Scotch  architect.  The  tramp  of 
the  many  multitudes  who  have  passed  over  it  has  never  yet  made  it 
to  "swing  dangerously,"  and  Lord  Russell  in  the  fulness  of  his 
age  was  but  yesterday  rejoicing  in  what  he  had  achieved,  and  even 
in  what  those  have  achieved  v/ho  have  altered  his  work  in  the  same 
spirit  in  which  he  designed  it. 

But  though  Sir  Walter  persuaded  himself  that  his  Conservatism 
was  all  founded  in  legitimate  distrust  of  reckless  change,  there  is 
evidence,  I  think,  that  at  times  at  least  it  was  due  to  elements  less 
noble.  The  least  creditable  incident  in  the  story  of  his  political 
life — which  Mr.  Lockhart,  with  his  usual  candour,  did  not  conceal 
— was  the  bitterness  with  which  he  resented  a  most  natural  and 
reasonable  Parliamentary  opposition  to  an  appointment  which  he 
had  secured  for  his  favourite  brother,  Tom.  In  1810  Scott  ap- 
pointed his  brother  Tom,  who  had  failed  as  a  Writer  to  the  Signet, 
to  a  place  vacant  under  himself  as  Clerk  of  Session.  He  had  not 
given  him  the  best  place  vacant,  because  he  thought  it  his  duty  to 
appoint  an  official  who  had  grown  grey  in  the  service,  but  he  gave 
Tom  Scott  this  man's  place,  which  was  worth  about  250/.  a  year. 
In  the  meantime  Tom  Scott's  affairs  did  not  render  it  convenient 
for  him  to  be  come-at-able,  and  he  absented  himself,  while  they 
were  being  settled,  in  the  Isle  of  Man.  Further,  the  Commission 
on  the  Scotch  system  of  judicature  almost  immediately  reported 
that  his  office  was  one  of  supererogation,  and  ought  to  be  abol- 
ished ;  but,  to  soften  the  blow,  they  proposed  to  allow  him  a  pen- 
sion of  130/.  per  annum.  This  proposal  was  discussed  with  some 
natural  jealousy  in  the  House  of  Lords.  Lord  Lauderdale  thought 
that  when  Tom  Scott  was  appointed,  it  must  have  been  pretty 
evident  that  the  Commission  would  propose  to  abolish  his  office, 
and  that  the  appointment  therefore  should  not  have  been  made. 
'*Mr.  Thomas  Scott,"  he  said,  "would  have  130/.  for  life  as  an  in- 
demnity for  an  office  the  duties  of  which  he  never  had  performed- 
while  those  clerks  who  had  laboured  for  twenty  years  had  no  ade, 
quate  remuneration."  Lord  Holland  supported  this  very  reason- 
able and  moderate  view  of  the  case  ;  but  of  course  the  Ministry 
carried  their  way,  and  Tom  Scott  got  his  unearned  pension. 
Nevertheless,  Scott  was  furious  with  Lord  Holland,  Writing  soon 
after  to  the  happy  recipient  of  this  little  pension,  he  says,  "  Lord 
Holland  has  been  in  Edinburgh,  and  we  met  accidentally  at  a 
public  party.  He  made  up  to  me,  but  I  remembered  his  part  in 
your  affair,  and  cut  him  with  as  little  remorse  as  an  old  pen."  Mr. 
Lockhart  says,  on  Lord  Jeffrey's  authority,  that  the  scene  was  a 
very  painful  one.  Lord  Jeffrey  himself  declared  that  it  was  the 
only  rudeness  of  which  he  ever  saw  Scott  guilty  in  the  course  of  a 
life-long  familiarity.  And  it  is  pleasant  to  know  that  he  renewed 
his  cordiality  with  Lord  Holland  in  later  years,  though  there  is  no 
evidence  that  he  ever  admitted  that  he  had  been  in  the  wrong. 
But  the  incident  shows  how  very  doubtful  Sir  Walter  ought 
to  have  felt  as  to  the  purity  of  his  Conservatism.    It  is  quite 


SI  A'  WALTER  SCOTT. 


95 


certain  that  the  proposal  to  abolish  Tom  Scott's  office  without 
compensation  was  not  a  reckless  experiment  of  a  fundamental  kind. 
It  was  a  mere  attempt  at  diminishing  the  heavy  burdens  laid  on  the 
people  for  the  advantage  of  a  small  portion  of  the  middle  class,  and 
yet  Scott  resented  it  with  as  much  display  of  selfish  passion — con- 
sidering his  genuine  nobility  of  breeding — as  that  with  which  the 
rude  working  men  of  Jedburgh  afterwards  resented  his  gallant 
protest  against  the  Reform  Bill,  and,  later  again,  saluted  the  daunt- 
less old  man  with  the  dastardly  cry  of  "  Burk  Sir  Walter  1 " 
Judged  truly,  I  think  Sir  Walter's  conduct  in  cutting  Lord  Holland 
"with  as  little  remorse  as  an  old  pen,"  for  simply  doing  his  duty 
in  the  House  of  Lords,  v/as  quite  as  ignoble  in  him  as  the  bullying 
and  insolence  of  the  democratic  party  in  1831,  when  the  dying  lion 
made  his  last  dash  at  what  he  regarded  as  the  foes  of  the  Con- 
stitution. Doubtless  he  held  that  the  mob,  or,  as  we  more  decor- 
ously say,  the  residuum,  were  in  some  sense  the  enemies  of  true 
freedom.  "  I  cannot  read  in  history,"  he  writes  once  to  Mr.  Laid- 
law,  "of  any  free  State  which  has  been  brought  to  slavery  till  the 
rascal  and  uninstructed  populace  had  had  their  short  hour  of 
anarchical  government,  which  naturally  leads  to  the  stern  repose  of 
military  despotism."  But  he  does  not  seem  ever  to  have  per- 
ceived that  educated  men  identify  themselves  with  "the  rascal  and 
uninstructed  populace,"  whenever  they  indulge  on  behalf  of  the 
selfish  interests  of  their  own  class,  passions  such  as  he  had  in- 
dulged in  fighting  for  his  brother's  pension.  It  is  not  the  w^ant  of 
instruction,  it  is  the  rascaldom,  i.  e.  the  violent  esprit  de  corps  of  a 
selfish  class,  which  "naturally  leads  "  to  violent  remedies.  Such 
rascaldom  exists  in  all  classes,  and  not  least  in  the  class  of  the  cul- 
tivated and  refined.  Generous  and  magnanimous  as  Scott  was,  he 
was  evidently  by  no  means  free  from  the  germs  of  it. 

One  more  illustration  of  vScott's  political  Conservatism,  and  I 
leave  his  political  life,  which  was  not  indeed  his  strong  side,  though, 
as  with  all  sides  of  Scott's  nature,  it  had  an  energy  and  spirit  all 
his  own.  On  the  subject  of  Catholic  Emancipation  he  took  a 
peculiar  view.  As  lie  justly  said,  he  hated  bigotry,  and  would  have 
left  the  Catholics  quite  alone,  but  for  the  great  claims  of  their  creed 
to  interfere  with  political  life.  And  even  so,  when  the  penal  laws 
were  once  abolished,  he  would  have  abolished  also  the  representa- 
tive disabilities,  as  quite  useless,  as  well  as  very  irritating  when  the 
iron  system  of  effective  repression  had  ceased.  But  he  disap- 
proved of  the  abolition  of  the  political  parts  of  the  penal  laws.  He 
thought  they  would  have  stamped  out  Roman  Catholicism  ;  and 
whether  that  were  just  or  unjust,  he  thought  it  would  have  been  a 
great  national  service.  "  As  for  Catholic  Emancipation,"  he  wrote 
to  Southey  in  1807,  "  I  am  not,  God  knows,  a  bigot  in  religious 
matters,  nor  a  friend  to  persecution  ;  but  if  a  particular  set  of  relig- 
ionists are  ipso  facto  connected  with  foreign  politics,  and  placed 
under  the  spiritual  direction  of  a  class  of  priests,  whose  unrivalled 
dexterity  and  activity  are  increased  by  the  rules  which  detach  them 
from  the  rest  of  the  world— I  humbly  think  that  we  maybe  excused 


96 


S/A'  WALTER  SCOTT. 


from  entrusting  to  them  those  places  in  the  State  where  the  influ- 
ence of  such  a  clergy,  who  act  under  the  direction  of  a  passive  tool 
of  our  worst  foe,  is  likely  to  be  attended  with  the  most  fatal  conse* 
quences.  If  a  gentleman  chooses  to  walk  about  with  a  couple  of 
pounds  of  gunpowder  in  his  pocket,  if  I  give  him  the  shelter  of  my 
roof,  I  may  at  least  be  permitted  to  exclude  him  from  the  seat  next 
to  the  fire.''  *  And  in  relation  to  the  year  1825,  when  Scott  visited 
Ireland,  Mr.  Lockhart  writes,  "  He  on  all  occasions  expressed 
manfully  his  belief  that  the  best  thing  for  Ireland  would  have  been 
never  to  relax  the  sixiciXy  political  enactments  of  the  penal  laws, 
however  harsh  these  might  appear.  Had  they  been  kept  in  vigour 
for  another  half-century,  it  was  his  conviction  that  Popery  would 
have  been  all  but  extinguished  in  Ireland.  But  he  thought  that 
after  admitting  Romanists  to  the  elective  franchise,  it  was  a  vaiu 
notion  that  they  could  be  permanently  or  advantageously  deterred 
from  using  that  franchise  in  favour  of  those  of  their  own  persua- 
sion. 

In  his  diary  in  1829  he  puts  the  same  view  still  more  strongly: 
— "  I  cannot  get  myself  to  feel  at  all  anxious  about  the  Catholic 
question.  I  cannot  see  the  use  of  fighting  about  the  platter,  when 
you  have  let  them  snatch  the  meat  oft  it.  I  hold  Popery  to  be  such 
a  mean  and  degrading  superstition,  that  I  am  not  sure  I  could  have 
found  myself  liberal  enough  for  voting  the  repeal  of  the  penal  laws 
as  they  existed  before  1780.  They  must  and  would,  in  course  of 
time,  have  smothered  Popery  ;  and  I  confess  that  I  should  have 
seen  the  old  lady  of  Babylon's  mouth  stopped  with  pleasure.  But 
now  that  you  have  taken  the  plaster  off  her  mouth,  and  given  her 
free  respiration,  I  cannot  see  the  sense  of  keeping  up  the  irritation 
about  the  claim  to  sit  in  Parliament.  Unopposed,  the  Cathohc 
superstition  may  sink  into  dust,  with  all  its  absurd  ritual  and  sol- 
emnities. Still  it  is  an  awful  risk.  The  world  is  in  fact  as  silly  as 
ever,  and  a  good  competence  of  nonsense  will  always  find  be- 
lievers." f  That  is  the  view  of  a  strong  and  rather  unscrupulous 
politician — a  moss-trooper  in  politics — which  Scott  certainly  was. 
He  Vv'as  thinking  evidently  very  little  of  justice,  almost  entirely  of 
the  most  effective  means  of  keeping  the  Kingdom,  the  Kingdom 
v/hich  he  loved.  Had  he  understood — what  none  of  the  politicians 
of  that  day  understood — the  strength  of  the  Church  of  Rome  as 
the  only  consistent  exponent  of  the  principle  of  Authority  in  relig- 
ion, I  believe  his  opposition  to  Catholic  emancipation  would  have 
been  as  bitter  as  his  opposition  to  Parliamentary  reform.  But  he 
took  for  granted  that  while  only  "silly  "  persons  believed  in  Rome, 
and  only  "  infidels  '*  rejected  an  authoritative  creed  altogether,  it 
was  quite  easy  by  the  exercise  of  common  sense,  to  find  the  true 
compromise  between  reason  and  religious  humility.  Had  Scott 
lived  through  the  religious  controversies  of  our  own  days,  it  seems 
not  unlikely  that  with  his  vivid  imagination,  his  warm  Conservatism, 
and  his  rather  inadequate  critical  powers,  he  might  himself  have 
become  a  Roman  Catliolic. 

*  l.orkliart's  Life  of  Scott^  lii-  34.  t  Ibid.,  ix-  305- 


-SaYv  iVALTER  SCOTT, 


9 


CHAPTER  XV. 

SCOTT  IN  ADVERSITY. 

With  the  year  1823  came  a  financial  crisis,  and  Constable  began 
to  tremble  for  his  solvency.  F'rom  the  date  of  his  baronetcy  Sir 
Walter  had  launched  out  into  a  considerable  increase  of  expendi- 
ture. He  got  plans  on  a  ratlier  large  scale  in  1821  for  the  increase 
of  Abbotsford,  which  were  all  carried  out.  To  meet  his  expenses 
in  this  and  other  ways  he  received  Constable's  bills  for  '^four  un- 
named works  of  fiction,"  of  which  he  had  not  written  a  line,  but 
which  came  to  exist  in  time,  and  were  called  Peveril  of  the  Peak, 
Quenti7t  Di^rward,  St.  Ronaii's  Well,  and  Redgauntlet.  Again,  in 
the  very  year  before  the  crash,  1825,  he  married  his  eldest  son,  the 
heir  to  the  title,  to  a  young  lady  who  was  herself  an  heiress.  Miss 
Jobson  of  Lochore,  when  Abbotsford  and  its  estates  wxre  settled, 
with  the  reserve  of  10,000/.,  which  Sir  Walter  took  power  to  charge 
on  the  property  for  purposes  of  business.  Immediately  afterwards 
he  purchased  a  captaincy  in  the  King's  Hussars  for  his  son,  which 
cost  him  3500/.  Nor  were  the  obhgations  he  incurred  on  his  own 
account,  or  that  of  his  family,  the  only  ones  by  which  he  was  bur- 
dened. He  was  always  incurring  expenses,  often  heavy  expenses, 
for  other  people.  Thus,  when  Mr.  Terry,  the  actor,  became  joint 
lessee  and  manager  of  the  Adelphi  Theatre,  London.  Scott  became 
his  surety  for  1250/.,  while  James  Ballantyne  became  his  surety  for 
500/.  more,  and  both  these  sums  had  to  be  paid  by  Sir  Walter  after 
Terry's  failure  in  1828.  Such  obligations  as  these,  however,  would 
have  been  nothing  when  compared  with  Sir  Walter's  means,  had 
all  his  bills  on  Constable  been  duly  honoured,  and  had  not  the 
printing  firm  of  Ballantyne  and  Co.  been  so  deeply  involved  with 
Constable's  house  that  it  necessarily  became  insolvent  when  he 
stopped.  Taken  altogether,  I  believe  that  Sir  Walter  earned  dur- 
ing his  own  hfetime  at  least  140.000/.  by  his  literary  work  alone, 
probably  more ;  while  even  on  his  land  and  building  combined  he 
did  not  apparently  spend  more  than  half  that  sum.  Then  he 
bad  a  certain  income,  about  1000/.  a  year  from  his  own  and  Lady 
Scott's  private  propert}^,  as  well  as  1300/.  a  year  as  Clerk  of  Session, 
and  300/.  more  as  Sheriff  of  Selkirk.  Thus  even  his  loss  of  the 
price  of  several  novels  bv  Constable's  failure  would  not  seriously 
have  compromised  Scolt's  position,  but  for  his  sl>are  in  the  printing' 


S//^  WALTER  SCOTT. 


house  which  fell  with  Constable,  and  the  obligations  of  which 
amounted  to  1 1 7,000/. 

As  Scott  had  always  forestalled  his  income, — spending  the 
purchase-money  of  his  poems  and  novels  before  they  were  written, 
— such  a  failure  as  this,  at  the  age  of  fifty-five,  when  all  the  fresh- 
ness of  his  youth  was  gone  out  of  him,  when  he  saw  his  son's 
prospects  blighted  as  well  as  his  own,  and  knew  perfectly  that 
Tames  Ballantyne,  unassisted  by  him,  could  never  hope  to  pay  any 
fraction  of  the  debt  worth  mentioning,  would  have  been  para-lysing, 
had  he  not  been  a  man  of  iron  nerve,  and  of  a  pride  and  courage 
hardly  ever  equalled.  Domestic  calamity,  too,  was  not  far  oft, 
For  two  years  he  had  been  watching  the  failure  of  this  wife's  health 
with  increasing  anxiety,  and  as  calamities  seldom  come  single,  her 
illness  took  a  most  serious  form  at  the  very  time  when  the  blow  fell, 
and  she  died  within  four  months  of  the  failure.  Nay,  Scott  was 
himself  unwell  at  the  critical  moment,  and  was  taking  sedatives 
which  discomposed  his  brain.  Twelve  days  before  the  final  failure, 
— which  was  announced  to  him  on  the  17th  January,  1826, — he 
enters  in  his  diary,  "  Much  alarmed.  I  had  walked  till  twelve  v/ith 
Skene  and  Russell,  and  then  sat  down  to  ray  work.  To  my  horror 
and  surprise  I  could  neither  write  nor  spell,  but  put  down  one  word 
for  another,  and  wrote  nonsense.  I  was  much  overpowered  at  the 
same  time  and  could  not  conceive  the  reason.  I  fell  asleep,  how- 
ever, in  my  chair,  and  slept  for  two  hours.  On  my  waking  my  head 
was  clearer,  and  I  began  to  recollect  that  last  night  I  had  taken  the 
anodyne  left  for  the  purpose  by  Clarkson,  and  being  disturbed  in 
the  course  of  the  night,  I  had  not  slept  it  off."  In  fact  the  hv- 
oscyamus  had,  combined  with  his  anxieties,  given  him  a  slight 
attack  of  what  is  now  called  aphasia,  that  brain  disease  the  most 
striking  symptom  of  which  is  that  one  word  is  mistaken  for  another. 
And  this  v/as  Scott's  preparation  for  his  failure,  and  the  bold 
resolve  which  followed  it,  to  work  for  his  creditors  as  he  had  worked 
for  himself,  and  to  pay  off,  if  possible,  the  whole  117,000/.  by  his 
own  literary  exertions. 

There  is  nothing  in  its  way  in  the  whole  of  English  biography 
more  impressive  than  the  stoical  extracts  from  Scott's  diary  which 
note  the  descent  of  this  blow.  Here  is  the  anticipation  of  the  pre- 
vious day:  "Edinburgh,  January  i6th. — Came  through  cold  roads 
to  as  cold  news.  Hurst  and  Robinson  have  suffered  a  bill  to  come 
back  upon  Constable,  which,  I  suppose,  infers  the  ruin  of  both 
houses.  We  shall  soon  see.  Dined  with  the  Skenes."  And  here 
is  the  record  itself:  "January  17th. — James  Ballantyne  this  morn- 
ing, good  honest  fellow,  with  a  visage  as  black  as  the  crook.  He 
hopes  no  salvation ;  has,  indeed,  taken  measures  to  stop.  It  is 
hard,  after  having  fought  such  a  battle.  I  have  apologized  for  not 
attending  the  Royal  Society  Club,  who  have  a  gaudeafittis  on  this 
day,  and  seemed  to  count  much  on  my  being  the  praeses.  My  old 
acquaintance  Miss  Elizabeth  Clerk,  sister  of  Willie,  died  suddenly. 
I  cannot  choose  but  wish  it  had  been  Sir  W.  S.,  and  yet  the  feeling 
is  unmanly.    I  have  Anne,  my  wife,  and  Charles  to  look  after.  1 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT, 


99 


felt  rather  sneaking  as  I  came  home  from  the  Parliament-liouse — 
felt  as  if  I  were  liable  i/ionsirari  dij^ito  m  no  very  pleasant  way. 
But  this  must  be  borne  cu?}i  cceteris j  and,  thank  God,  however 
uncomfortable,  I  do  not  feel  despondent."*  On  the  following  day, 
the  1 8th  January,  the  day  after  the  blow,  he  records  a  bad  night,  a 
wish  that  the  next  two  days  were  over,  but  that  the  worst  is  over," 
and  on  the  same  day  he  sat  about  making  notes  for  the  7nag7iiiin 
opus^  as  he  called  it — the  complete  edition  of  all  the  novels,  with  a 
new  introduction  and  notes.  On  the  19th  January,  two  days  after 
the  failure,  he  calmly  resumed  the  composition  of  Woodstock — the 
novel  on  which  he  was  then  engaged — and  completed,  he  says, 
about  twenty  printed  pages  of  it ;  "  to  which  he  adds  that  he  had  "  a 
painful  scene  after  dinner  and  another  after  supper,  endeavouring 
lo  convince  these  poor  creatures  "  [his  wife  and  daughter]  "  that 
they  must  not  look  for  miracles,  but  consider  the  misfortune  as 
certain,  and  only  to  be  lessened  by  patience  and  labour."  On  the 
2 1  St  January,  after  a  number  of  business  details,  he  quotes  from 
Job,  "  Naked  we  entered  the  world  and  naked  we  leave  it ;  blessed 
be  the  name  of  the  Lord."  On  the  22nd  he  says,  "  I  feel  neither 
dishonoured  nor  broken  down  by  the  bad,  now  truly  bad,  news  I 
have  received.  I  have  walked  my  last  in  the  domains  I  have  planted 
— sat  the  last  time  in  the  halls  I  have  built.  But  death  would  have 
taken  them  from  me,  if  misfortune  had  spared  them.  My  poor 
people  whom  I  loved  so  well !  There  is  just  another  die  to  turn  up 
against  me  in  this  run  of  ill-luck,  i.  e.  if  I  should  break  my  magic 
wand  in  the  fall  from  this  elephant,  and  lose  my  popub.rity  with  my 
fortune.  Then  Woodstock  and  Boney  "  [his  life  of  Napoleon]  may 
both  go  to  the  paper-maker,  and  I  may  take  to  smoking  cigars  and 
drinking  grog,  or  turn  devotee  and  intoxicate  the  brain  another 
way."  t  He  adds  that  when  he  sets  to  work  doggedly,  he  is  exactly 
the  same  man  he  ever  was,  neither  low-spirited  nor  distrait^''  nay, 
that  adversitv  is  to  him    a  tonic  and  bracer." 

The  heaviest  blow  was,  I  think,  the  blow  to  his  pride.  Very 
early  he  begins  to  note  painfully  the  different  v/ay  in  which  different 
friends  greet  him,  to  remark  that  some  smile  as  if  to  say,  think 
nothing  about  it,  my  lad,  it  is  quite  out  of  our  thoughts;"  that 
others  adopt  an  affected  gravity,  such  as  one  sees  and  despises 
at  a  funeral,"  and  the  best-bred  just  shook  hands  and  went  on." 
He  writes  to  Mr.  Morritt  with  a  proud  indifference,  clearly  to  some 
extent  simulated  : — "  My  womenkind  will  be  the  greater  sufferers, 
yet  even  they  look  cheerily  ;  and,  for  myself,  the  blowing  off  of  my 
hat  on  a  stormy  day  has  given  me  more  uneasiness."  J  To  Lady 
Davy  he  writes  truly  enough  : — "  I  beg  my  humblest  compliments 
to  Sir  Humphrey,  and  tell  him,  111  Luck,  that  direful  chemist,  never 
put  into  his  crucible  a  more  indissoluble  piece  of  stuff  than  your 
affectionate  cousin  and  sincere  well-wisher,  Walter  Scott."  §  When 
his  Letters  of  Malachi  Malagfowther  came  out  he  writes  : — "  I  am 
glad  of  this  bruilzie,  as  far  as  I  am  concerned  ;  people  will  not  dare 

♦  Lockhart's  Life  o/Scot,  viii.  197.  t  Ibid.,  viii.  203-4. 

X  Ibid.,  viii.  235.  §  Ibid.,  viii.  238. 


100 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT, 


talk  of  me  as  an  object  of  pity — no  more  *pooi -manning/  Who 
asks  how  many  punds  Scots  the  old  champion  had  in  his  pocket 
when 

'  He  set  a  bugle  to  his  mouth, 

And  blew  so  loud  and  shrill, 
The  trees  in  greenwood  shook  thereat, 
Sae  loud  rang  every  hill. ' 

This  sounds  conceited  enough,  yet  is  not  far  from  truth."  *  His 
dread  of  pity  is  just  the  same  when  his  wife  dies  : — "  Will  it  be 
better,"  he  writes,  "  when  left  to  my  own  feehngs,  I  see  the  whole 
world  pipe  and  dance  around  me  1  I  think  it  will.  Their  sympathy 
intrudes  on  my  present  affliction."  -Again,  on  returning  for  the 
first  time  from  Edinburgh  to  Abbotsford  after  Lady  Scott's  funeral : 
— "  I  again  took  possession  of  the  family  bedroom  and  my  widowed 
couch.  This  was  a  sore  trial,  but  it  was  necessary  not  to  blink 
such  a  resolution.  Indeed  I  do  not  like  to  have  it  thought  that 
tliere  is  any  way  in  which  I  can  be  beaten."  And  again  : — I 
have  a  secret  pride — I  fancy  it  will  be  so  most  truly  termed — which 
impels  me  to  mix  with  my  distresses  strange  snatches  of  mirth, 
'  which  have  no  mirth  in  them.'  "  f 

But  though  pride  was  part  of  Scott's  strength,  pride  alone 
never  enabled  any  man  to  struggle  so  vigorously  and  so  unremit- 
tingly as  he  did  to  meet  the  obligations  he  had  incurred.  When 
he  was  in  Ireland  in  the  previous  year,  a  poor  woman  who  had 
offered  to  sell  him  gooseberries,  but  whose  offer  had  not  been 
accepted,  remarked,  on  seeing  his  daughter  give  some  pence  to  a 
beggar,  that  they  might  as  well  give  her  an  alms  too,  as  she  was 
an  old  struggler."  Sir  Walter  was  struck  with  the  expression, 
and  said  that  it  deserved  to  become  classical,  as  a  name  for  those 
who  take  arms  against  a  sea  of  troubles,  instead  of  yielding  to  the 
waves.  It  was  certainly  a  name  the  full  meaning  of  which  he  himself 
deserved.  His  house' in  Edinburgh  was  sold,  and  he  had  to  go 
into  a  certain  Mrs.  Brown's  lodgings,  when  he  was  discharging  his 
duties  as  Clerk  of  Session.  His  v/ife  was  dead.  His  estates  was 
conveyed  to  trustees  for  the  benefit  of  his  creditors  till  such  time 
as  he  should  pay  off  Ballantyne  and  Go's,  debt,  which  of  course  in 
his  lifetime  he  never  did.  Yet  between  January,  1826,  and  January, 
1828,  he  earned  for  his  creditors  very  nearly  40,coo/.  Woodstock 
sold  for  8,228/.,  "a  matchless  sale,"  as  Sir  Walter  remarked,  "for 
less  than  three  months'  work."  The  first  two  editions  of  The  Life 
of  Napoleon  Bonaparte,  on  which  Mr.  Lockhart  says  that  Scott 
had  spent  the  unremitting  labour  of  about  two  years — labour  in- 
volving a  far  greater  strain  on  eyes  and  brain  than  his  imaginative 
work  ever  caused  him — sold  for  18,000/.  Had  Sir  Walter's  health 
lasted,  he  would  have  redeemed  his  obligations  on  behalf  of  Bal- 
lantyne and  Co.  within  eight  or  nine  years  at  most  from  the  time  of 
his  failure.  But  what  is  more  remarkable  still,  is  that  after  his 
health  failed  he  struggled  on  with  little  more  than  half  a  brain, 


Lockhart's  Life  0/ Scott ^  viii.  2 


t  Ibid.,  viii.  347,  371,  381. 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTIA 


lOI 


but  a  whole  will,  to  work  while  it  was  yet  day,  though  the  evening 
was  dropping  fast.  Count  Robert  of  Paris  and  Castle  Da^igerous 
were  really  the  compositions  of  a  paralytic  patient. 

It  was  in  September,  1830,  that  the  first  of  these  tales  was 
begun.  As  early  as  the  15th  P^ebniary  of  that  year  he  had  had 
his  first  true  paralytic  seizure.  He  had  been  discharging  his  duties 
as  clerk  of  session  as  usual,  and  received  in  the  afternoon  a  visit 
from  a  lady  friend  of  his,  Miss  Young,  who  was  submitting  to  him 
some  manuscript  memoirs  of  her  father  when  the  stroke  came.  It 
was  but  slight.  He  struggled  against  it  with  his  usual  iron  power 
of  will,  and  actually  managed  to  stagger  out  of  the  room  where  the 
lady  was  sitting  with  him,  into  the  drawing-room  where  his  daughter 
was,  but  there  he  fell  his  full  length  on  the  floor.  He  was  capped, 
and  fully  recovered  his  speech  during  the  course  of  the  day,  but 
Mr.  Lockhart  thinks  that  never,  after  this  attack,  did  his  style 
recover  its  full  lucidity  and  terseness.  A  cloudiness  in  words  and 
a  cloudiness  of  arrangement  began  to  be  visible.  In  the  course  of 
the  year  he  retired  from  his  duties  of  clerk  of  session,  and  his 
publishers  hoped  that,  by  engaging  him  on  the  new  and  complete 
edition  of  his  works,  they  might  detach  him  from  the  attempt  at 
imaginative  creation  for  which  he  was  now  so  much  less  fit.  But 
Sir  Walter's  will  survived  his  judgment.  When,  in  the  previous 
year,  Ballantyne  had  been  dissabled  from  attending  to  business  by 
his  wife's  illness  (which  ended  in  her  death),  Scott  had  written  in 
his  diary,  "  It  is  his  (Ballantyne's)  nature  to  indulge  apprehensions 
of  the  worst  which  incapacitate  him  for  labour.  I  cannot  lieip 
regarding  this  amiable  weakness  of  the  mind  with  something  too 
nearly  aUied  to  contempt,"  and  assuredly  he  v/as  guilty  of  no  such 
weakness  himself.  Not  only  did  he  row  much  harder  against  the 
stream  of  fortune  than  he  had  ever  rowed  with  it,  but,  what  required 
still  more  resolution,  he  fought  on  against  the  growing  conviction, 
that  his  imagination  would  not  kindle,  as  it  used  to  do,  to  its  old 
heat. 

When  he  dictated  to  Laidlaw, — for  at  this  time  he  could  hardly 
write  himself  for  rheumatism  in  the  hand, — he  would  frequently 
pause  and  look  round  him,  like  a  man  mocked  with  shadows." 
Then  he  bestirred  himself  with  a  great  effort,  rallied  his  force, 
and  the  style  again  flowed  clear  and  bright,  but  not  for  long.  The 
clouds  would  gather  again,  and  the  mental  blank  recur.  This  soon 
became  visible  to  his  publishers,  who  wrote  discouragingly  of  the 
new  novel — to  Scott's  own  great  distress  and  irritation.  The 
oddest  feature  in  the  matter  was  that  his  letters  to  them  were  full 
of  the  old  terseness,  and  force,  and  caustic  turns.  On  business  he 
was  as  clear  and  keen  as  in  his  best  days.  It  was  only  at  his 
highest  task,  the  task  of  creative  work,  that  his  cunning  began  to 
fail  him.  Here,  for  instance,  are  a  few  sentences  written  to  Cadell, 
his  publisher,  touching  this  very  point — the  disccuragement  which 
James  Ballantyne  had  been  pouring  on  the  new  novel.  Ballantyne, 
he  says,  finds  fault  with  the  subject,  when  what  he  really  should 
have  found  fault  with  was  the  failing  power  of  the  author  : — ^*  James 


102 


S/A'  WALTER  SCOTT. 


is,  with  many  other  kindly  critics,  perhaps  in  the  predicament  of 
an  honest  drunkard,  when  crop-sick  the  next  morning,  who  does 
not  ascribe  the  malady  to  the  wine  he  has  drunk,  but  to  having 
tasted  some  particular  dish  at  dinner  which  disagreed  with  his 

stomach  1  have  lost,  it  is  plain,  the  power  of  interesting  the 

country,  and  ought,  in  justice  to  all  parties,  to  retire  while  I  have 
some  credit.     But  this  is  an  important  step,  and  I  will  not  be 

obstinate  about  it  if  it  be  necessary  Frankly,  I  cannot  think 

of  flinging  aside  the  half-finished  volume,  as  if  it  were  a  corked 

bottle  of  wine  I  may,  perhaps,  take  a  trip  to  the  Continent 

for  a  year  or  two,  if  I  find  Othello's  occupation  gone,  or  rather 
Othello's  ReputatiotiJ''  And  again,  in  a  very  able  letter  written 
on  the  1 2th  of  December,  1830,  to  Cadell,  he  takes  a  view  of  the 
situation  with  as  much  calmness  and  imperturbability  as  if  he  were 
an  outside  spectator.  There  were  many  circumstances  in  the 
matter  which  you  and  J.  B.  (James  Ballantyne)  could  not  be  aware 
of,  and  which,  if  you  were  aware  of,  might  have  influenced  your 
judgment,  which  had,  and  yet  have,  a  most  powerful  effect  upon 
mine.  The  deaths  of  both  my  father  and  mother  have  been 
preceded  by  a  paralytic  shock.  My  father  survived  it  for  nearly 
two  years — a  melancholy  respite,  and  not  to  be  desired.  I  was 
alarmed  with  Miss  Young's  morning  visit,  when,  as  you  know,  I 
lost  my  speech.  The  medical  people  said  it  was  from  the  stomach, 
which  might  be,  but  while  there  is  a  doubt  upon  a  point  so  alarming, 
you  will  not  wonder  that  the  subject,  or  to  use  Hare's  lingo^  the 
shot^  should  be  a  little  anxious."  He  relates  how  he  had  followed 
all  the  strict  medical  regivte  prescribed  to  him  with  scrupulous 
regularity,  and  then  begun  his  work  again  with  as  much  attention 
as  he  could.  "And  having  taken  pains  with  my  story,  I  find  it  is 
not  relished,  nor  indeed  tolerated,  by  those  who  have  no  interest 
in  condemning  it,  but  a  strong  interest  in  putting  even  a  face 
(?  force)  "  upon  their  consciences.  Was  not  this,  in  the  circum- 
stances, a  damper  to  an  invahd  already  afraid  that  the  sharp  edge 
might  be  taken  off  his  intellect,  though  he  was  not  himself  sensible 
of  that?"  In  fact,  no  more  masterly  discussion  of  the  question 
whether  his  mind  were  failing  or  not,  and  what  he  ought  to  do  in 
the  interval  of  doubt,  can  be  conceived,  than  these  letters  give  us. 
At  this  time  the  debt  of  Ballantyne  and  Co.  had  been  reduced  by 
repeated  dividends — all  the  fruits  of  Scott's  literary  work — more 
than  one  half.  On  the  17th  of  December,  1830,  the  liabilities  stood 
at  54,000/.,  having  been  reduced  63,000/.  within  five  years.  And 
Sir  Walter,  encouraged  by  this  great  result  of  his  labour,  resumed 
the  suspended  novel. 

But  with  the  beginning  of  1831  came  new  alarms.  On  January 
5th  Sir  Walter  enters  in  his  diary, — "Very  indifferent,  with  more 
awkward  feelings  than  I  can  well  bear  up  against.  My  voice  sunk 
and  my  head  strangely  confused."  Still  he  struggled  on.  On  the 
31st  January  he  went  alone  to  Edinburgh  to  sign  his  will,  and 
stayed  at  his  bookseller's  (Cadell's)  house  in  Athol  Crescent.  A 

^  Lockhart's  Life  p/ Scott,  x.  ii,i2. 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT, 


great  snow-storm  set  in  which  kept  him  in  Edinburgh  and  m  Mr. 
Cadell's  house  till  the  9th  February.  One  day  while  the  snow  was 
still  falling  heavily  Ballantyne  reminded  him  that  a  motto  was 
wanting  for  one  of  the  chapters  of  Count  Robert  of  Paris,  He 
went  to  the  window,  looked  out  for  a  moment,  and  then  wrote, — 

"  The  storm  increases  ;  'tis  no  sunny  shower, 
Foster'd  in  the  moist  breast  of  March  or  April, 
Or  such  as  parched  summer  cools  his  lips  with. 
Heaven's  windows  are  flung  wide ;  the  inmost  deeps 
Call,  in  hoarse  greeting,  one  upon  another ; 
On  comes  the  flood,  in  all  its  foaming  horrors, 
And  Where's  the  dike  shall  stop  it  ? 

The  Deluge :  A  Poem. 

Clearly  this  failing  imagination  of  Sir  Walter's  was  still  a  great 
deal  more  vivid  than  that  of  most  men,  with  brains  as  sound  as  it 
ever  pleased  Providence  to  make  them.  But  his  troubles  were  not 
yet  even  numbered.  The  storm  increased,''  and  it  was,  as  he  said, 
"no  sunny  shower."  His  lame  leg  became  so  painful  that  he  had 
to  get  a  mechanical  apparatus  to  relieve  him  of  some  of  the  burden 
of  supporting  it.  Then,  on  the  21st  March,  he  was  hissed  at  Jed- 
burgh, as  I  have  before  said,  for  his  vehement  opposition  to  Re- 
form. In  April  he  had  another  stroke  of  paralysis  which  he  now 
himself  recognised  as  one.  Still  he  struggled  on  at  his  novel. 
Under  the  date  of  May  6,  7,  8,  he  makes  this  entry  in  his  diary  : — 
"  Here  is  a  precious  job.  I  have  a  formal  remonstrance  from  those 
critical  people,  Ballantyne  and  Cadell,  against  the  last  volume  of 
Count  Robert,,  which  is  within  a  sheet  of  being  finished.  I  suspect 
their  opinion  will  be  found  to  coincide  with  that  of  the  public  ;  at 
least  it  is  not  very  different  from  my  own.  The  blow  is  a  stunning 
one,  I  suppose,  for  I  scarcely  feel  it.  It  is  singular,  but  it  comes 
with  as  little  surprise  as  if  I  had  a  remedy  ready ;  yet  God  knows 
I  am  at  sea  in  the  dark,  and  the  vessel  leaky,  I  think,  into  the  bar- 
gain. I  cannot  conceive  that  I  have  tied  a  knot  with  my  tongue 
which  my  teeth  cannot  untie.  We  shall  see.  I  have  suffered 
terribly,  that  is  the  truth,  rather  in  body  than  mind,  and  I  often 
wish  I  could  lie  down  and  sleep  without  waking.  But  I  will  fight 
it  out  if  I  can."  *  The  medical  men  with  one  accord  tried  to  make 
him  give  up  his  novel-writing.  But  he  smiled  and  put  them  by. 
He  took  up  Count  Robert  of  Paris  again,  and  tried  to  recast  it. 
On  the  1 8th  May  he  insisted  on  attending  the  election  for  Rox- 
burghshire, to  be  held  at  Jedburgh,  and  in  spite  of  the  unmannerly 
reception  he  had  met  with  in  March,  no  dissuasion  would  keep  him 
at  home.  He  was  saluted  in  the  town  with  groans  and  blasphemies, 
and  Sir  Walter  had  to  escape  from  Jedburgh  by  a  back  way  to 
avoid  personal  violence.  The  cries  of  Burk  Sir  Walter,"  with 
which  he  was  saluted  on  this  occasion,  haunted  him  throughout  his 
illness  and  on  his  dying  bed.    At  the  Selkirk  election  it  was  Sir 

•  Lockhart's  Life  0/ Scoti,  x.  65-6 


I04 


SIk  V/ALTER  SCOTT, 


Walter's  duty  as  Sheriff  to  preside,  and  his  family  therefore  made 
no  attempt  to  dissuade  him  from  his  attendance.  There  he  was  so 
well  known  and  loved,  that  in  spite  of  his  Tory  views,  he  was  not 
insuited,  and  the  only  man  who  made  any  attempt  to  hustle  the 
Tory  electors,  was  seized  by  Sir  Walter  with  his  own  hand,  as  he 
got  out  of  his  carriage,  and  committed  to  prison  without  resistance 
till  the  election  day  w^as  over. 

A  seton  which  had  been  ordered  for  his  head,  gave  him  some 
relief,  and  of  course  the  first  result  was  that  he  turned  immediately 
to  his  novel-writing  again,  and  began  Castle  Dangerous  in  July, 
183 1, — the  last  July  but  one  which  he  was  to  see  at  all.  He  even 
made  a  little  journey  in  company  with  Mr.  Lockhart,  in  order  to 
see  the  scene  of  the  story  he  washed  to  tell,  and  on  his  return  set 
to  work  with  all  his  old  vigour  to  finish  his  tale,  and  put  the  con- 
cluding touches  to  Count  Robert  of  Paris,  But  his  temper  was  no 
longer  what  it  had  been.  He  quarrelled  with  Ballantyne,  partly  for 
his  depreciatory  criticism  of  Cotmt  Robert  of  Paris,  partly  for  his 
growing  tendency  to  a  mystic  and  strait-laced  sort  of  dissent  and 
his  increasing  Liberalism.  Even  Mr.  Laidlaw  and  Scott's  children 
had  much  to  bear.  But  he  struggled  on  even  to  the  end,  and  did 
not  consent  to  try  the  experiment  of  a  voyage  and  visit  to  Italy  till 
his  immediate  work  was  done.  Well  might  Lord  Chief  Baron  Shep- 
herd apply  to  Scott  Cicero's  description  of  some  contemporary  of 
his  own,  who  ^'  had  borne  adversity  wisely,  who  had  not  been  broken 
by  fortune,  and  who,  amidst  the  buffets  of  fate,  had  maintained 
his  dignity."  There  was  in  Sir  Walter,  I  think,  at  least  as  much 
of  the  Stoic  as  the  Christian.  But  Stoic  or  Christian,  he  was  a 
hero  of  the  old,  indomitable  type.  Even  the  last  fragments  of  his 
imaginative  power  were  all  turned  to  account  by  that  unconquerable 
will,  amidst  the  discouragement  of  friends,  and  the  still  more  dis- 
heartening doubts  of  his  own  mind.  Like  the  headland  stemming 
a  rough  sea,  he  was  gradually  worn  away,  but  never  crushed. 


SIK  WALTER  "^COTT, 


CHAPTER  XVI, 

THE   LAST  YEAR. 

In  the  month  of  September,  1831,  the  disease  of  the  brain 
which  had  long  been  in  existence  must  have  made  a  considerable 
step  in  advance.    For  the  first  time  the  illusion  seemed  to  possess 
Sir  Walter  that  he  had  paid  off  all  the  debt  for  which  he  was  liable, 
and  that  he  was  once  more  free  to  give  as  his  generosity  prompted. 
Scott  sent  Mr.  Lockhart  50/.  to  save  his  grandchildren  some  slight 
inconvenience,  and  told  another  of  his  correspondents  that  he  had 
"  put  his  decayed  fortune  into  as  good  a  condition  as  he  could  de- 
sire.''   It  was  well,  therefore,  that  he  had  at  last  consented  to  try 
the  effect  of  travel  on  his  health, — not  that  he  could  hope  to  arrest 
by  it  such  a  disease  as  his,  but  that  it  diverted  him  from  the  most 
painful  of  all  efforts,  that  of  trying  anew  the  spell  which  bad  at 
last  failed  him,  and  perceiving  in  the  disappointed  eyes  of  his  old 
admirers  that  the  magic  of  his  imagination  was  a  thing  of  the  past. 
The  last  day  of  real  enjoyment  at  Abbotsford — for  when  Sir  Walter 
returned  to  it  to  die,  it  was  but  to  catch  once  more  the  outlines  of 
its  w^alls,  the  rustle  of  its  woods,  and  the  gleam  of  its  waters, 
through  senses  already  darkened  to  all  less  familiar  and  less  fascin- 
ating visions — was  the  22nd  September,  1831.    On  the  21st,  Words- 
worth had  come  to  bid  his  old  friend  adieu,  and  on  the  22nd — the 
last  day  at  home — they  spent  the  morning  together  in  a  visit  to 
Newark.    It  was  a  day  to  deepen  alike  in  Scott  and  in  Wordsworth 
whatever  of  sympathy  either  of  them  had  v/ith  the  very  different 
genius  of  the  other,  and  that  it  had  this  result  in  Wordswortlrs 
case,  we  know  from  the  very  beautiful  poem, — Yarrow  Revisited," 
— and  the  sonnet  which  the  occasion  also  produced.    And  even 
Scott,  who  was  so  little  of  a  Wordsworthian,  who  enjoyed  Johnson's 
stately  but  formal  verse,  and  Crabbe's  vivid  Dutch  painting,  more 
than  he  enjoyed  the  poetry  of  the  transcendental  school,  must  have 
recurred  that  day  with  more  than  usual  emotion  to  his  favourite 
Wordsworthian  poem.    Soon  after  his  wife's  death,  he  had  re 
marked  in  his  diary  how  finely  '^the  effect  of  grief  upon  persons 
who  like  myself  are  highly  susceptible  of  hurnour  "  had  been 
touched  by  Wordsvv'orth  in  the  character  of  the  merry  villasfe 
teacher,  Matthew,  whom  Jeffrey  profanely  calls  a  half-crazy,  senti/ 


io6 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


mental  person."  *  And  long  before  this  time,  during  the  brightest 
period  of  his  life,  Scott  had  made  the  old  Antiquary  of  his  novel 
quote  the  same  poem  of  Wordsworth's,  in  a  passage  where  the 
period  of  life  at  which  he  had  now  arrived  is  anticipated  with  singu- 
lar pathos  and  force.  ^'  It  is  at  such  moments  as  these,"  says  Mr. 
Oldbuck,  "  that  we  feel  the  changes  of  time.  The  same  objects 
are  before  us — those  inanimate  things  which  we  have  gazed  on  in 
wayward  infancy  and  impetuous  youth,  in  anxious  and  scheming 
manhood — they  are  permanent  and  the  same  ;  but  when  we  look 
upon  them  in  cold,  unfeeling  old  age,  can  we,  changed  in  our  temper, 
our  pursuits,  our  feelings,— changed  in  our  form,  our  limbs,  and 
our  strength, — can  we  be  ourselves  called  the  same  ?  or  do  we  not 
rather  look  back  with  a  sort  of  w^onder  upon  our  former  selves  as 
beings  separate  and  distinct  from  what  we  now  are  1  The  philoso- 
pher who  appealed  from  Philip  inflamed  with  wine  to  Phihp  in  his 
hours  of  sobriety,  did  not  claim  a  judge  so  different  as  if  he  had 
appealed  from  Philip  in  his  youth  to  Philip  in  his  old  age.  I  can- 
not but  be  touched  with  the  feeling  so  beautifully  expressed  in  a 
poem  which  I  have  heard  repeated  : — 

*My  eyes  are  dim  with  childish  tears, 

My  heart  is  idly  stirr'd, 
For  the  same  sound  is  in  my  ears 

Which  in  those  days  I  heard, 
"^hus  fares  it  still  in  our  decay, 

And  yet  the  wiser  mind 
Mourns  less  for  what  age  takes  away 

Than  what  it  leaves  behind.' "  t 

Sir  Walter's  memory,  which,  in  spite  of  the  slight  failure  of 
brain  and  the  mild  illusions  to  which,  on  the  subject  of  his  own 
prospects,  he  was  now  liable,  had  as  yet  been  litde  impaired — in- 
deed, he  could  still  quote  whole  pages  from  all  his  favourite  authors 
— must  have  recurred  to  those  favourite  Wordsworthian  lines  of 
his  with  singular  force,  as,  with  Wordsworth  for  his  companion,  he 
gazed  on  the  refuge  of  the  last  Minstrel  of  his  imagination  for  the 
last  time,  and  felt  in  himself  how  much  of  joy  in  the  sight,  age  had 
taken  away,  and  how  much,  too,  of  the  habit  of  expecting  it,  it  had 
unfortunately  left  behind.  Whether  Sir  Walter  recalled  this  poem 
of  Wordsworth's  on  this  occasion  or  not — and  if  he  recalled  it,  his 
delight  in  giving  pleasure  would  assuredly  have  led  him  to  let 
Wordsworth  know  that  he  recalled  it — the  mood  it  paints  was  un- 
questionably that  in  which  his  last  day  at  Abbotsford  was  passed. 
In  the  evening,  referring  to  the  journey  which  was  to  begin  the 
next  day,  he  remarked  that  Fielding  and  Smollett  had  been  driven 
abroad  by  declining  health,  and  that  they  had  never  returned  ; 
while  Wordsworth — willing  perhaps  to  bring  out  a  brighter  feature 
in  the  present  picture — regretted  that  the  last  days  of  those  two 
great  novelists  had  not  been  surrounded  by  due  marks  of  respect. 
With  Sir  Walter,  as  he  well  knew,  it  was  different.    The  Liberal 


•  Lockhart's  Life  of  Scott ^  ix.  6j. 


\  The  A  ntiquary,  chao.  »- 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


Government  that  he  had  so  bitterly  opposed  were  pressing  on  him 
signs  of  the  honour  in  which  he  was  held,  and  a  ship  of  his  Majes- 
ty's navy  had  been  placed  at  his  disposal  to  take  him  to  the  Med- 
iterranean. And  Wordsworth  himself  added  his  own  more  durable 
token  of  reverence.  As  long  as  English  poetry  lives,  English- 
men will  know  something  of  that  last  day  of  the  last  Minstrel  at 
Newark : — 

"  Grave  thoughts  ruled  wide  on  that  sweet  day. 

Their  dignity  installing 
In  gentle  bosoms,  while  sere  leaves 

Were  on  the  bough  or  falling ; 
But  breezes  play'd,  and  sunshine  gleam'd 

The  forest  to  embolden, 
Reddened  the  fiery  hues,  and  shot 

Transparence  through  the  golden. 

**  For  busy  thoughts  the  stream  flowM  on 

In  foamy  agitation  ; 
And  slept  in  many  a  crystal  pool 

For  quiet  contemplation  : 
No  public  and  no  private  care 

The  free-born  mind  enthralling. 
We  made  a  day  of  happy  hours. 

Our  happy  days  recalling. 

=)^=  #  #  * 

And  if,  as  Yarrow  through  the  woods 

And  down  the  meadow  ranging, 
Did  meet  us  with  unalter'd  face, 

Though  we  were  changed  and  changing  ; 
If  then  some  natural  shadow  spread 

Our  inward  prospect  over, 
The  soul's  deep  valley  was  not  slow 

Its  brightness  to  recover. 

"  Eternal  blessings  on  the  Muse 

And  her  divine  employment, 
The  blameless  Muse  who  trains  her  sons 

For  hope  and  calm  enjoyment ; 
Albeit  sickness  lingering  yet 

Has  o'er  their  pillow  brooded, 
And  care  waylays  their  steps — a  sprite 

Not  easily  eluded. 

*  #  *  *  1^ 

**  Nor  deem  that  localized  Romance 

Plays  false  with  our  affections  ; 
Unsanctifies  our  tears — made  sport 

For  fanciful  dejections  : 
Ah,  no !  the  visions  of  the  past 

Sustain  the  heart  in  feeling 
Life  as  she  is — our  changeful  Life 

With  friends  and  kindred  dealing. 


io8 


5//^  WALTER  SCOTT, 


Bear  witness  ye,  whose  thoughts  that  day 

In  Yarrow's  groves  were  centered, 
Who  through  the  silent  portal  arch 

Of  mouldering  Newark  enter'd ; 
And  clomb  the  winding  stair  that  once 

Too  timidly  was  mounted 
By  the  last  Minstrel — not  the  last ! — 

Ere  he  his  tale  recounted." 

Thus  did  the  meditative  poetry,  the  day  of  which  was  not  )ct,  dv. 
honour  to  itself  in  doing  homage  to  the  Minstrel  of  romantit  energy 
and  martial  enterprise,  who,  with  the  school  of  poetry  he  loved, 
was  passing  away. 

On  the  23rd  September  Scott  left  Abbotsford,  spendmg  five 
days  on  his  journey  to  London ;  nor  would  he  allow  any  of  the  old 
objects  of  interest  to  be  passed  without  getting  out  of  the  carriage 
to  see  them.  He  did  not  leave  London  for  Portsmouth  till  the 
23rd  October,  but  spent  the  intervening  time  in  London,  where  he 
took  medical  advice,  and  with  his  old  shrewdness  wheeled  his  chair 
into  the  dark  corner  during  the  physicians'  absence  from  the  room 
to  consult,  that  he  might  read  their  faces  clearly  on  their  return 
without  their  being  able  to  read  his.  They  recognized  traces  of 
brain  disease,  but  Sir  Walter  was  relieved  by  their  comparatively 
favourable  opinion,  for  he  admitted  that  he  had  feared  insanity,  and 
therefore  had  "feared  them:'  On  the  29th  of  October  he  sailed  for 
Malta,  and  on  the  20th  November  Sir  Walter  insisted  on  being 
landed  on  a  small  volcanic  island  which  had  appeared  four  months 
previously,  and  which  disappeared  again  in  a  few  days,  and  on  clam- 
bering about  its  crumbling  lava,  in  spite  of  sinking  at  nearly  every 
step  most  up  to  his  knees,  in  order  that  he  might  send  a  descrip- 
tion of  it  to  his  old  friend  Mr.  Skene.  On  the  22nd  November 
he  reached  Malta,  where  he  looked  eagerly  at  the  antiquities  of  the 
place,  for  he  still  hoped  to  write  a  novel — and,  indeed,  actually 
wrote  one  at  Naples,  which  was  never  published,  called  The  Siege 
of  Malta — on  the  subject  of  the  Knights  of  Malta,  who  had  inter- 
ested him  so  much  in  his  youth.  From  Malta  Scott  went  to 
Naples,  which  he  reached  on  the  17th  December,  and  where  he 
found  much  pleasure  in  the  society  of  Sir  Willian  Gell,  an  invalid 
like  liimself,  but  not  one  who,  like  himself,  struggled  against  the 
admission  of  his  infirmities,  and  refused  to  be  carried  when  his 
own  legs  would  not  safely  carry  him.  Sir  William  GelPs  dog 
delighted  the  old  man;  he  would  pat  it  and  call  it  Poor  boy! 
and  confide  to  Sir  William  how  he  had  at  home  "  two  very  fine 
favourite  dogs,  so  large  that  I  am  alw^ays  afraid  they  look  too 
large  and  too  feudal  for  my  diminished  income."  In  all  his  letters 
home  he  gave  some  injunction  to  Mr.  Laidlaw  about  the  poor  peo- 
ple and  the  dogs. 

On  the  22nd  of  March,  1832,  Goethe  died,  an  event  which  made 
a  great  impression  on  Scott,  who  had  intended  to  visit  Weimer  on 
his  way  back,  on  purpose  to  see  Goethe,  and  this  much  increased 
bis  eager  desire  to  return  home.    Accordingly  on  the  i6th  of  April^ 


S/A'  WALTER  SCOTT. 


the  last  day  on  which  he  made  any  entry  in  his  diary,  he  quitted 
Naples  for  Rome,  where  he  stayed  long  enough  only  to  let  liis 
daughter  see  something  of  the  place,  and  hurried  off  homewards 
on  the  21  St  of  May.  In  Venice  he  was  still  strong  enough  to  insist 
on  scrambling  down  into  the  dungeons  adjoining  the  Bridge  of 
Sighs;  and  at  Frankfort  he  entered  a  bookseller's  shop,  when  tlie 
the  man  brought  out  a  lithograph  of  Abbotsford,  and  Scott  remark- 
ing, I  know  that  already,  sir,"  left  the  shop  unrecognised,  more 
than  ever  craving  for  home.  At  Nimeguen,  on  the  9th  of  June, 
while  in  a  steamboat  on  the  Rhine,  he  had  his  most  serious  attack 
of  apoplexy,  but  would  not  discontinue  his  journey,  was  lifted  into 
an  English  steamboat  at  Rotterdam  on  the  i  ith  of  June,  and  ar- 
rived in  London  on  the  13th.  There  he  recognised  his  children, 
and  appeared  to  expect  immediate  death,  as  he  gave  them  repeat- 
edly his  most  solemn  blessing,  but  for  the  most  part  he  lay  at  the 
St.  James's  Hotel,  in  Jermyn  Street,  without  any  power  to  converse. 
There  it  was  that  Allan  Cunningham,  on  walking  home  one  night, 
found  a  group  of  working  men  at  the  corner  of  the  street,  who 
stopped  him  and  asked,  as  if  there  was  but  one  death-bed  in 
London,  '  Do  you  know,  sir,  if  this  is  the  street  where  he  is  lying  t '  " 
According  to  the  usual  irony  of  destiny,  it  was  while  the  working 
men  were  doing  him  this  hearty  and  unconscious  homage,  that  Sir 
Walter,  whenever  disturbed  by  the  noises  of  the  street,  imagined 
himself  at  the  polling-booth  of  Jedburgh,  where  the  people  had 
cried  out,  Burk  Sir  Walter."  And  it  was  while  lying  here, — only 
nov/  and  then  uttering  a  few  words, — that  Mr.  Lockhart  says  of 
him,  "  He  expressed  his  will  as  determinedly  as  ever,  and  ex- 
pressed it  with  the  same  apt  and  good-natured  irony  that  he  was 
wont  to  use." 

Sir  Walter's  great  and  urgent  desire  was  to  return  to  Abbots- 
ford,  and  at  last  his  physicians  yielded.  On  the  7th  of  July  he  was 
lifted  into  his  carriage,  followed  by  his  trembling  and  weeping 
daughters,  and  so  taken  to  a  steamboat,  where  the  captain  gave  up 
his  private  cabin — a  cabin  on  deck — for  his  use.  He  remained  un- 
conscious of  any  change  till  after  his  arrival  in  Edinburgh,  when, 
on  the  nth  July,  he  was  placed  again  in  his  carriage,  and  rem.ained 
in  it  quite  unconscious  during  the  first  two  stages  of  the  journey  to 
Tweedside.  But  as  the  carriage  entered  the  valley  of  the  Gala, 
he  began  to  look  about  him.  Presently  he  murmured  a  name  or 
two,  Gala  water,  surely, — Buckholm, — Torwoodlee."  W^hen  the 
outline  of  the  Eildon  hills  came  in  view,  Scott's  excitement  was 
great,  and  when  his  eye  caught  the  towers  of  Abbotsford,  he  sprang 
up  with  a  cry  of  delight,  and  while  the  towers  remained  in  sight  it 
took  his  physician,  his  son-in-law,  and  his  servant,  to  keep  him  in 
the  carriage.  Mr.  Laidlaw  was  waiting  for  him,  and  he  met 
with  aery,  "  Ha!  Willie  Laidlaw  !  O,  man,  how  often  I  have  thought 
of  you  ! His  dogs  came  round  his  chair  and  began  to  fawn  on 
him  and  lick  his  hands,  while  Sir  Walter  smiled  or  sobbed  over 
them.  The  next  morning  he  was  wheeled  about  his  garden,  and 
on  the  following  morning  was  out  in  this  way  for  a  couple  of  hours ; 


no 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT. 


within  a  day  or  two  he  fancied  that  he  could  write  again,  but  on 
taking  the  pen  into  his  hand,  his  fingers  could  not  clasp  it,  and  he 
sank  back  with  tears  rolling  down  his  cheek.  Later,  when  Laid- 
law  said  in  his  hearing  that  Sir  Walter  had  had  a  little  repose,  he 
replied,  "  No,  Willie  ;  no  repose  for  Sir  Walter  but  in  the  grave/' 
As  the  tears  rushed  from  his  eyes,  his  old  pride  revived.  Friends," 
he  said,  "don't  let  me  expose  myself — get  me  to  bed, — that  is  the 
only  place." 

After  this  Sir  Walter  never  left  his  room.  Occasionally  he 
dropped  off  into  delirium,  and  the  old  painful  memory, — that  cry 
of  "  Burk  Sir  Walter," — might  be  again  heard  on  his  lips.  He 
lingered,  however,  till  the  21st  September, — more  than  two  months 
from  the  day  of  his  reaching  home,  and  a  year  from  the  day  of 
Wordsworth's  arrival  at  Abbotsford  before  his  departure  for  the 
Mediterranean,  with  only  one  clear  interval  of  consciousness,  on 
Monday,  the  17th  September.  On  that  day  Mr.  Lockhart  was 
called  to  Sir  Walter's  bedside  with  the  news  that  he  had  awaked  in 
a  state  of  composure  and  consciousness,  and  wished  to  see  him. 
" Lockhart,'  he  said,  '  I  may  have  but  a  minute  to  speak  to  you. 
My  dear,  be  a  good  man, — be  virtuous, — be  religious, — be  a  good 
man.  Nothing  else  will  give  you  any  comfort  when  you  come  to  lie 
here.'  He  paused,  and  I  said,  '  Shall  I  send  for  Sophia  and  Anne  ?  ' 
*  No,'  said  he,  ^  don't  disturb  them.  Poor  souls  !  1  know  they  were 
up  all  night.  God  bless  you  all ! ' With  this  he  sank  into  a  very 
tranquil  sleep,  and,  indeed,  he  scarcely  afterwards  gave  any  sign  of 
consciousness  except  for  an  instant  on  the  arrival  of  his  sons.  And 
so  four  days  afterwards,  on  the  day  of  the  autumnal  equinox  in 
1832,  at  half-past  one  in  the  afternoon,  on  a  glorious  autumn 
day,  with  every  window  wide  open,  and  the  ripple  of  the  Tweed 
over  its  pebbles  distinctly  audible  in  his  room,  he  passed  away, 
"  his  eldest  son  kissed  and  closed  his  eyes."  He  died  a  month 
after  completing  his  sixty-first  year.  Nearly  seven  years  earlier, 
on  the  7th  December,  1825,  he  had  in  his  diary  taken  a  survey  of 
his  own  health  in  relation  to  the  age  reached  by  his  father  and 
other  members  of  his  family,  and  had  stated  as  the  result  of  his 
considerations,  Square  the  odds  and  good  night.  Sir  Walter, 
about  sixty.  I  care  not  if  I  leave  my  name  unstained  and  my  fam- 
ily property  settled.  Sat  est  vixisse.'^''  Thus  he  lived  just  a  year-— 
but  a  year  of  gradual  death — beyond  his  own  calculation. 


s//?  WALTER  scon: 


111 


CHAPTER  XVII. 

THE  END  OF  THE  STRUGGLE. 

Sir  Walter  certainly  left  his  "  name  unstained,"  unless  the 
serious  mistakes  natural  to  a  sanguine  temperament  such  as  his, 
are  to  be  counted  as  stains  upon  his  name ;  and  if  they  are,  where 
among  the  sons  of  men  would  you  find  many  unstained  names  as 
noble  as  his  with  such  a  stain  upon  it  1  He  was  not  only  sensi- 
tively  honourable  in  motive,  but,  when  he  found  what  evil  his  san- 
guine temper  had  worked,  he  used  his  origantic  powers  to  repair  it, 
as  Samson  used  his  great  strength  to  repair  the  mischief  he  had 
inadvertently  done  to  Israel.  But  with  all  his  exertions  he  had 
not,  when  death  came  upon  him,  cleared  off  much  more  than  half 
his  obligations.  There  was  still  54,000/.  to  pay.  But  of  this, 
22,000/.  was  secured  in  an  insurance  on  his  life,  and  there  were  be- 
sides a  thousand  pounds  or  two  in  the  hands  of  the  trustees,  which 
had  not  been  appHed  to  the  extinction  of  the  debt.  Mr.  Cadell, 
his  publisher,  accordingly  advanced  the  remaining  30,000/.  on  the 
security  of  Sir  Walter's  copyrights,  and  on  the  21st  February, 
1833,  the  general  creditors  were  paid  in  full,  and  Mr.  Cadell  re- 
mained  the  only  creditor  of  the  estate.  In  February,  1847,  Sir 
Walter^s  son,  the  second  baronet,  died  childless  ;  and  in  May, 
1847,  Mr.  Cadell  gave  a  discharge  in  full  of  all  claims,  including 
the  bond  for  10,000/.  executed  by  Sir  Walter  during  the  struggles 
of  Constable  and  Co.  to  prevent  a  failure,  on  the  transfer  to  him  of 
all  the  copyrights  of  Sir  Walter,  including  "  the  results  of  some 
literary  exertions  of  the  sole  surviving  executor,"  which  I  conject- 
ure to  mean  the  copyright  of  the  admirable  biography  of  Sir  Walter 
Scott  in  ten  volumes,  to  which  I  have  made  such  a  host  of  refer- 
ences— probably  the  most  perfect  specimen  of  a  biography  rich  in 
great  materials,  which  our  language  contains.  And  thus,  nearly 
fifteen  years  after  Sir  Walter's  death,  the  debt  which,  within  six 
years,  he  had  more  than  half  discharged,  was  at  last,  through  the 
value  of  the  copyrights  he  had  left  behind  him,  finally  extinguished, 
and  the  small  estate  of  Abbotsford  left  cleared. 

Sir  Walter's  effort  to  found  a  new  house  was  even  less  success- 
ful than  the  effort  to  endow  it.  His  eldest  son  died  childless.  In 
1839  he  went  to  Madras,  as  Lieutenant-Colonel  of  the  1 5th  Hus- 
sars, and  subsequently  commanded  that  regiment.     He  \Tas  as 


112 


SIR  V/ALTER  SCOTT, 


much  beloved  by  the  officers  of  his  regiment  as  his  father  had  been 
by  his  own  friends,  and  was  in  every  sense  an  accornphshed  sol- 
dier, and  one  whose  greatest  anxiety  it  was  to  promote  the  welfare 
of  the  privates  as  well  as  of  the  officers  of  his  regiment.  He  took 
great  pains  in  founding  a  library  for  the  soldiers  of  his  corps,  and 
his  only  legacy  out  of  his  own  family  was  one  of  100/  to  this  library. 
The  cause  of  his  death  was  his  having  exposed  himself  rashly  to 
the  sun  in  a  tiger-hunt,  in  August,  1846 ;  he  never  recovered  frofj^ 
the  fever  which  was  the  immediate  consequence.  Ordered  hof^' 
for  bis  health,  he  died  near  the  Cape  of  Good  Hope,  on  the  8th 
February,  1847.  His  brother  Charles  died  before  him.  He  was 
rising  rapidly  in  the  diplomatic  service,  and  was  taken  to  Persia 
by  Sir  John  MacNeill,  on  a  diplomatic  mission,  as  attache  anr' 
private  secretary.  But  the  climate  struck  him  down,  and  he  diea 
at  Teheran,  almost  immediately  on  his  arrival,  on  the  28th  October, 
1 841.  Both  the  sisters  had  died  previously.  Anne  Scott,the  younger 
of  the  two,  whose  health  had  suffered  greatly  during  the  prolonged 
anxiety  of  her  father's  illness,  died  on  the  Midsummer-day  of  the 
year  following  her  father's  death  ;  and  Sophia,  Mrs.  Lockhart, 
died  on  the  17th  May,  1837.  Sir  Walter's  eldest  grandchild,  John 
Hugh  Lockhart,  for  whom  the  Tales  of  a  Grandfather  ^^x^  writ- 
ten, died  before  his  grandfather ;  indeed  Sir  Walter  heard  of  the 
child's  death  at  Naples.  The  second  son,  Walter  Scott  Lockhart 
Scott,a  lieutenant  in  the  army,  died  at  Versailles,  on  theioth  January, 
1853.  Charlotte  Harriet  Jane  Lockhart,  who  was  married  in  1847 
to  James  Robert  Hope-Scott,  and  succeeded  to  the  Abbotsford 
estate,  died  at  Edinburgh,  on  the  26th  October,  1858,  leaving  three 
children,  of  whom  only  one  survives.  Walter  Michael  and  Mar- 
garet Anne  Hope-Scott  both  died  in  infancy.  The  only  direct 
descendant,  therefore,  of  Sir  Walter  Scott,  is  now  Mary  Monica 
Hope-Scott  v/ho  was  born  on  the  2nd  October,  1852,  the  grand- 
child of  Mrs.  Lockhart,  and  the  great-grandchild  of  the  founder  of 
Abbotsford. 

There  is  something  of  irony  in  such  a  result  of  the  Herculean 
labours  of  Scott  to  found  and  endow  a  new  branch  of  the  clan  of 
Scott.  When  fifteen  years  after  his  death  the  estate  was  at  length 
freed  from  debt,  all  his  own  children  and  the  eldest  of  his  grand- 
children were  dead  ;  and  now  forty-six  years  have  elapsed,  and 
there  only  remains  one  girl  of  his  descendants  to  borrow  his  name 
and  live  in  the  halls  of  which  he  was  so  proud.  And  yet  this,  and 
this  only,  was  wanting  to  give  something  of  the  grandeur  of  tragedy 
to  the  end  of  Scott's  great  enterprise.  He  valued  his  works  little 
compared  with  the  house  and  lands  which  they  were  to  be  the 
means  of  gaining  for  his  descendants  ;  yet  every  end  for  which  he 
struggled  so  gallantly  is  all  but  lost,  while  his  works  have  gained 
more  of  added  lustre  from  the  losing  battle  which  he  fought  so 
long,  than  they  could  ever  have  gained  from  his  success. 

What  there  was  in  him  of  true  grandeur  could  never  have  been 
seen,  had  the  fifth  act  of  his  life  been  less  tragic  than  it  was. 
Generous,  large-hearted,  and  magnanimous  as  Scott  was,  there  was 


S/A'  WALTER  SCOTT. 


1^3 


something  in  the  days  of  his  prosperity  that  fell  short  of  what  men 
need  for  their  highest  ideal  of  a  strong  man.  Unbroken  success, 
unrivalled  popularity,  imaginative  effort  flowing  almost  as  steadily 
as  the  current  of  a  stream, — these  are  characteristics,  which,  even 
when  enhanced  as  they  were  in  his  case,  by  the  power  to  defy 
physical  pain,  and  to  live  in  his  imaginative  world  when  his  body 
was  writhing  in  torture,  fail  to  touch  the  heroic  point.  And  there 
was  nothing  in  Scott,  while  he  remained  prosperous,  to  relieve 
adequately  the  glare  of  triumphant  prosperity.  His  religious  and 
moral  feeling,  though  strong  and  sound,  was  purely  regulative,  and 
not  always  even  regulative,  where  his  inward  principle  was  not  re- 
flected in  the  opinions  of  the  society  in  which  he  lived.  The  finer 
spiritual  element  in  Scott  was  relatively  deficient,  and  so  the 
strength  of  the  natural  man  was  almost  too  equal,  complete,  and 
glaring.  Something  that  should  "  tame  the  glaring  white  "  of  that 
broad  sunshine,  was  needed  ;  and  in  the  years  of  reverse,  when 
one  gift  after  another  was  taken  away,  till  at  length  what  he  called 
even  his  "magic  wand  "  was  broken,  and  the  old  man  struggled 
on  to  the  last,  without  bitterness,  without  defiance,  without  murmur- 
ing, but  not  without  such  sudden  flashes  of  subduing  sweetness  as 
melted  away  the  anger  of  the  teacher  of  his  childhood, — that  some- 
thing seemed  to  be  supplied.  Till  calamity  came,  Scott  appeared  to 
be  a  nearly  complete  natural  man,  and  no  more.  Then  first  was 
perceived  in  him  something  above  nature,  something  which  could 
endure  though  every  end  in  life  for  which  he  had  fought  so  boldly 
should  be  defeated, — something  which  could  endure  and  more  than 
endure,  which  could  shoot  a  soft  transparence  of  its  own 
through  his  years  of  darkness  and  decay.  That  there  was  nothing 
very  elevated  in  Scott's  personal  or  moral,  or  political  or  lit- 
erary ends, — that  he  never  for  a  moment  thought  of  himself 
as  one  who  was  bound  to  leave  the  earth  better  than  he  found 
it, — that  he  never  seems  to  have  so  much  as  contemplated  a 
social  or  political  reform  for  which  he  ought  to  contend, — that  he 
lived  to  some  extent  like  a  child  blowing  soap-bubbles,  the  bright- 
est and  most  gorgeous  of  which — the  Abbotsford  bubble — vanished 
before  his  eyes,  is  not  a  take-off  from  the  charm  of  his  career,  but 
adds  to  it  the  very  speciality  of  its  fascination.  For  it  was  his  en- 
tire unconsciousness  of  moral  or  spiritual  efforts,  the  simple 
straightforward  way  in  which  he  laboured  for  ends  of  the  most 
ordinary  kind,  which  made  it  clear  how  much  greater  the  man  was 
than  his  ends,  how  great  was  the  mind  and  character  which  pros- 
perity failed  to  display,  but  which  became  visible  at  once  so  soon 
as  the  storm  came  down  and  the  night  fell.  Few  men  who  battle 
avowedly  for  the  right,  battle  for  it  with  the  calm  fortitude,  the 
cheerful  equanimity,  with  which  Scott  battled  to  fulfil  his  engage- 
ments and  to  save  his  family  from  ruin.  He  stood  high  amongst 
those — 

*^  Who  ever  with  a  frolic  welcome  took 
The  thunder  and  the  sunshine,  and  opposed 
Free  hearts,  free  foreheads," 
8 


114 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT, 


among  tnose  who  have  been  able  to  display — 

One  equal  temper  of  heroic  hearts 

Made  weak  by  time  and  fate,  but  strong  in  will, 

To  strive,  to  seek,  to  find,  and  not  to  yield." 

And  it  was  because  the  man  was  so  much  greater  than  the  ends 
for  which  he  strove,  that  there  is  a  sort  of  grandeur  in  the  tragic 
fate  which  denied  them  to  him,  and  yet  exhibited  to  all  the  world 
the  infinite  superiority  of  the  striver  himself  to  the  toy  he  was  thus 
passionately  craving. 


THE  ENB 


